Los Angeles Lakers: 5 things they can learn from their inexcusable losses

4. Ingraining and maintaining the right habits

According to the late motivational speaker and author Earl Nightingale, success is the “progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” Many focus on tangible results, but what success really comes down to is habits, activity and attitude.

According to another great motivational author and speaker, John C. Maxwell, “Small disciplines repeated with consistency every day lead to great achievements gained slowly over time.”

Whatever the Lakers did to build the right disciplines, habits, attitude and actions, repeated with consistency during the first half of the season, have seemingly been replaced with their bad counterparts. After every loss, the players always say they need to do certain things better next time, only to repeat the same errors again and again.

To paraphrase what someone wise once said, the way you do anything at any time is the way you do everything all the time. This goes along with the previous lesson I mentioned. When adversity hits, that’s the time to really be grounded in your principles, disciplines and habits. Obviously, this team got away from it and let themselves off the hook.

To be fair, it’s hard to maintain all that good stuff when key injuries hit, because the Lakers were forced to roll out many different starting lineups and switch up their strategy a bit. But, the right stuff mentally never changes. Clearly, once the losses started piling up in January, this team got down on itself instead of reminding itself that they were good enough to bounce back.

This Lakers team has plenty of talent in terms of being able to make the playoffs. But, hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard, especially on the defensive end, which has been the biggest bone of contention and biggest manifest of the team’s bad habits and attitude during this latest swoon.