Los Angeles Lakers: How will their peak defense perform?

This offseason, there’s been a lot of noise about the type of offensive-minded players Los Angeles Lakers management brought in for the upcoming season and how they’ll affect Frank Vogel’s vaunted defensive system.

We’ll cut through the national media noise and see what type of slippage—if any—we can expect from the Lakers peak 5-man defensive unit throughout 2021-2022.

A Lakers enthusiast going by the moniker CrimeDogLA uploaded a fan post onto  Silver Screen and Roll a few weeks ago with a strong point I’m going to run with. Here’s what CrimeDogLA had to say:

"“Well as a baseline, when we talk about better or worse on offense or defense, we are really talking about a couple different things. One is the team’s offensive or defensive rank over the course of a season, points scored or points scored against over 100 possessions. The other is a team’s peak offensive or defensive potential for a given game or set of possessions.”"

The Purple and Gold should see some decline to their overall regular season defensive metrics. We’re not here to talk about that, though. We’re here to analyze how the Lakers “peak” defensive 5-man unit will perform during regular season clutch situations and throughout the playoffs.

First, we’ll decide which players belong in the Lakers’ peak defensive unit, and finally, we’ll get into what we can expect from them.