December was not a month to remember for the Los Angeles Lakers. After a hot start to the 2025-26 NBA season, the final month of the calendar year brought nothing other than a dreadful display of the wheels rattling, with concerns of them falling off entirely rapidly creeping up for the Lakers.
Los Angeles went 5-7 in December. That includes them being losers in four of their last five games. It's not just the losses, though, it's the margins. Every Lakers loss during this past month was by double digits. They were outscored by 94 points in their 12 games played overall.
Excuses are never something a team wants to be making this early in the campaign. However, LeBron James did point to an important fact regarding why the struggles have been so prominent during their recent shortcomings.
"We haven't had a full team all year," James said. "I don't know, maybe one game we had a full roster, maybe even not. ... There's been a lot of in and out. So, that's very hard to get a rhythm of chemistry on the floor with guys that you know you're going to play with every night."
Lakers' injury troubles have cost them an opportunity to properly gel
James followed up those words with admitting that injuries should still not be an excuse for a lack of execution. That was something the Lakers also struggled with in their brutal 128-106 blowout loss to the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday.
Injuries will always call for a mentality of next man up. Even while that is the case, it can still be tough, to LeBron's point, to truly figure out how all the pieces of a team fit together in the process of battling through the ailments bombarding a squad.
The Lakers' issues go beyond simply injuries. If it were that simple, the doom and gloom in Los Angeles surrounding a 20-11 basketball team would not exist.
The defense continues to stand out for all the wrong reasons. The Lakers posted a defensive rating of 122.4 during the month of December. That was among the five worst units on that end in the given time span.
Turnovers have continued to be a massive issue as well. The 1.53 assist-to-turnover ratio for the Lakers was similarly one of the worst in the NBA during December.
Getting players healthy will help fix some problems for the Lakers. That much is true. However, there are controllable areas of the game that Los Angeles is willingly struggling with at present. That much deserves a raised eyebrow or two in concern.