3. Boy, the Lakers were terrible in this game!
To be clear, a win is a win. The Lakers have to show that they can win games when things are not going smoothly. But this is ridiculous. The only thing worse than watching the Lakers run their offense was the Utah Jazz running theirs. I could go into how bad Ricky Rubio shoots or the sophomore slump Donovan Mitchell is in right now. But this is a Los Angeles Lakers website.
The Lakers turned the ball over 23 times in the game. The offense, for the most part, was isolation plays that led to either a turnover or a bad shot at the tail end of the shot clock. It was pretty brutal.
How brutal?
LeBron James was the only player with an assist for the Lakers for much of the game! Lonzo Ball did not have an assist until around the fourth quarter (He only finished with two!). Brandon Ingram had none and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was the only Laker player besides Ball and LeBron to have an assist in this game with one.
With the constant turnovers the Lakers had, it affected ball movement that led to a bad night from the 3-point line.
The Lakers shot a putrid 7-of-30 from the land of the extra point for an anemic 30.4 percent. Now, about half of these came late in the second half when the Lakers finally put the game to bed, but only three players cashed in from distance when it really mattered in LeBron James (2-of-5), Brandon Ingram (2-of-3) and Lance Stephenson (1-of-2), dropping an important three to help keep the Jazz at bay.
It is amazing that the Lakers could win a game with a 10-to-23 assist to turnover ratio. But this is how they did it…
Defense!