Los Angeles Lakers: Instant takeaways in sloppy loss to Thunder

The Los Angeles Lakers played an ugly basketball game and lost to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Two days after clinching the first seed in the Western Conference for the first time in a decade, the Los Angeles Lakers played an ugly basketball game and were easily bested by the Oklahoma City Thunder, 105-86.

Technically speaking, this game did not matter at all from the Lakers’ standpoint with the first seed already locked up and no real incentive to get home-court advantage over the Milwaukee Bucks in a potential NBA Finals matchup.

And while Frank Vogel did experiment with different rotations and lineups, which definitely did make a difference, this was still a really poor game from the Lakers. They played sloppily, played from behind the entire game and lacked energy.

Here are my instant takeaways from the disappointing loss.

1. Yet again, this team lives and dies by Anthony Davis

We said this after the team’s win against the Utah Jazz and we will say it again here: the Los Angeles Lakers live and die by Anthony Davis. Yes, LeBron James is the face of the team, but the most important player on this team is Davis and it is not even close.

After a dominant performance against the Jazz where he went toe-to-toe with Rudy Gobert, Davis had yet another lackluster game where he looked passive at times. He finished with nine points, five assists and eight rebounds while making three of 11 from the field.

This was a completely different game than the Utah game. The Lakers went through Davis in that game and the results followed. Here, there were several possessions where LeBron was off the court, Davis was on and he did not even touch the ball.

I get that the team is trying to figure out things around their two superstars but gaining some momentum with some wins is equally as important. In this game that balance was way off and the team did not utilize Davis as much as they should have.