New Year, Same Lakers

Still hungover from their New Year’s celebrations, the Lakers offered up another putrid performance in a lopsided loss to the Memphis Grizzlies. Yet another loss to a sub .500 team. Yet another lackluster effort. Same ol’ Lakers.

Do these Lakers have any desire to defend their title? Did they just expect teams to kiss the rings and rollover? That’s certainly how they’re playing these days.

From the opening tip you could see how much more this game meant to Memphis. Unwilling to heed the warning issued by Kobe on Christmas the Lake Show continues to take their opposition far too lightly.

Once again the offense was stagnant as careless turnovers turned into easy buckets for the Grizzlies all night long. There is no transition game to be found anywhere. A once exciting team is now more boring than watching a Matlock marathon. Meanwhile, less than stellar teams are looking like champs against the champs.

The problem is the Lakers are champs in title only. They’re not playing like champs. Nor are they even acting like champs.

Clearly Phil Jackson’s men think they can just flip the switch when needed. Problem is they’re groping in the dark looking for that switch. Being unable to find any consistency on offense or defense has doomed this team to take the most difficult road possible to three-peat.

Where do we go from here?

This team isn’t learning anything from these losses and they’re certainly not improving from any of their wins either. You can pretty much kiss homecourt goodbye. The Western Conference isn’t as deep as it’s been in recent years but there’s enough experience out there to finish off the Lake Show in a seven game series. The time has come for the Lakers to stop snoozing and answer the bell. No title is won or lost in January but plenty of hopes are certainly dashed when bad habits become the norm.