Los Angeles Lakers: 4 lessons in ugly loss to San Antonio Spurs
By Ronald Agers
The San Antonio Spurs got their revenge over the Los Angeles Lakers on Thursday night.
The Los Angeles Lakers came to Staples Center looking for a season sweep and fifth straight win against the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday. The Lakers did not score a point for the four minutes of the game, they allowed a hot 3 point team in the Spurs to kill them and turnovers are just a few bad habits (Or souvenirs!) the Lakers brought home that resulted in a loss!
Lake Show Life breaks down what else happened in Lake Show Life Lessons! The only Los Angeles Lakers extended post-game report with in-depth analysis and highlights.
Well, let’s get this point out of the way quickly. The Los Angeles Lakers are not championship contenders. Will they make the playoffs? Yes. Will they be a top-three seed? Absolutely. Are they good enough to repeat the way this team is constructed? Nope.
It took one road trip for Lake Show Life to see this loss coming. Even though the Los Angeles Lakers swept all four games on the road, they struggled with two back to back sets with a couple of teams that should have been blown out by halftime. Lake Show Life was on record after every game reporting that they could have easily lost them all. This game was a carbon copy of all the road games.
In the first game against the San Antonio Spurs, they were without LaMarcus Aldridge and missed at least eight layups. The bad play was lost based on other stories like LeBron James’ birthday and Becky Hammon making history as the first woman head coach in American sports history.
In the second game against the Spurs, San Antonio figured out how to hit shots at the front of the rim and Keldon Johnson had a career scoring night. It took Anthony Davis playing out of his mind scoring 34 points for the Lakers to escape with a win.
When the Lakers traveled to Memphis, it should have been a foregone conclusion that there would be no problems. The Grizzlies was playing without three of their top players including Ja’ Morant. Instead Anthony Davis and Dennis Schroder did not score a point until just before halftime. Bad defense and a huge 27-5 run kept the game close until the fourth quarter. Only then it was LeBron James’ turn to go crazy as the Lakers pulled off to a win.
To close out the road trip in Memphis, the Lakers played even worse. Bad shooting, turnovers and listless play had Memphis up 79-77 with 4:40 to go in the 4th quarter. To beat a Memphis team that was depleted with injuries, it took a 15 point explosion from LeBron and AD to pull the game out. Even that was ugly. Turnovers and missed assignments made the game closer than it had to be.
How bad was this last game? A long time follower of the Lake Show Life Lessons series, Corky Carroll, had this statement in the comment section.
Corky Carroll:
"It just doesn’t seem like we are playing well enough to be top five both offense and defense, everybody else must be slow getting going too. I can’t wait to see us when we really do start playing good both offensively and defensively. I am really glad to see you use the word “ugly” at the beginning of this piece. I am going to include here my comment from your earlier piece about this game just to underline my feeling on last nights performance of THE UGLY LAKLING. In other words, it was NOT PRETTY. GO LAKERS."
Well, it seems that Corky will have to wait for the Chicago game tonight to hope some more. The Los Angeles Lakers continued their streak of listless and uneven play that plagued them since the start of the road trip in San Antonio.
The difference? The San Antonio Spurs welcomed back LaMarcus Aldridge back to the lineup and carried their lights out 3-point shooting over from the Clippers game.
The Los Angeles Lakers didn’t get their season sweep over the San Antonio Spurs this season losing 118-109. It’s their first loss to San Antonio since December of 2018.
The trend of the Lakers getting more production from the bench than the starting lineup continues. LeBron James and Anthony Davis continued their scoring dominance collecting 50 points on 19-32 shooting, but the performances on the defensive end cancels that out. Now let’s discuss the rest of the starting lineup.
Kyle Kuzma:
It’s going to either be “Good Kuz” or “Bad Kuz”. Having a plus/minus score of -17 will put him in the “Bad Kuz” category. Sure he scored 13 points and grabbed 10 rebounds, but he was inefficient shooting 16 shots to get his points and his defensive rotations were awful. This Lessons series is out of reasons for his inconsistencies. There’s a comment section below if you want to help us out.
Marc Gasol:
Marc Gasol was in foul trouble basically the entire game and got benched after foul number four. He scored 4 points, grabbed one rebound (This is the center folks!), a block and 3 turnovers. Guess what? He will be starting the next game. Why? Markieff Morris is now being exposed for his lazy defense. Lake Show Life could talk about needing a center, but that’s like saying the sky is blue and water is wet at this point.
Dennis Schroder:
His nickname is Dennis “The Menace”. But for who? Schroder scored 6 points on 3-11 shooting, missed all of his 3 point shots and had a team-low plus/minus of -18. Lake Show Life could talk about his defense, but that’s like saying the sun comes out in the daytime and the moon comes out at night at this point.
The bench has been a positive for the Lakers this season, but when the starters aren’t producing on either end, who cares?
Don’t believe the staff? Just listen to the franchise player and future of the Los Angeles Lakers. At least we don’t curse.
Anthony Davis vents frustration about lack of defense being played by this revamped Lakers team: "We didn't play any defense. Our defense was shit tonight. We didn't play one lick of defense and them guys did whatever they want." pic.twitter.com/IDv3cxtBkh
— Ryan Ward (@RyanWardLA) January 8, 2021
If it wasn’t for Keldon Johnson blowing a wide-open dunk and two other layups, the Lakers could have easily been down by 20 points in the first quarter. The Los Angeles Lakers were as bad as AD mentioned after the game on defense (More on that later!). The Spurs was shooting as high as 80 percent from the field in the opening moments of the game.
To the new Los Angeles Lakers fans that are checking us out for the first time, welcome to Lake Show Life Lessons. Our extended post-game report with video analysis will cover the progress for the Los Angeles Lakers the entire season!
Over the next several pages we will provide highlights of certain players and coaches. Afterward, the comment section is loaded with knowledgeable fans adding their basketball knowledge. We usually start with the stars.
Let’s get to Lesson One to find out who!