The Los Angeles Lakers have lost four in a row, 11-of-13, are two games below .500 and currently sit as the No. 11 seed in the West, outside of even the play-in tournament. It’s a sharp fall for a team playing in the Western Conference Finals last May. After the latest loss — against a Grizzlies team that shot lights out against the Lakers’ defense — LeBron James summed up the state of the Lakers succinctly:
“We just suck right now.”
Reports of frustration within the Lakers locker room, particularly with coach Darvin Ham’s rotations, have started to leak out. Ham showed some of that frustration — and stepped in a pile of trouble — when he preached perspective and told a passionate Lakers fan base to chill during this losing streak.
“This is the NBA, man, this is a marathon. You have to look at the totality of the picture,” Ham said after the loss to Memphis. “I’m tired of people living and dying with every single game we play. Like it’s ludicrous, actually. It’s like, Come on, man, this is a marathon and we hit and we hit a tough stretch. You know, it’s the same team that, we played some high level games a little while ago and we just got to get back to that.”
Those high-level games were in the In-Season Tournament, which the Lakers won in Las Vegas. However, in a sign of just how disconnected the Lakers players and Ham are right now, here was LeBron’s answer when asked about getting back to the level the team showed in Las Vegas.
“Man, that was just two games though,” LeBron said. “It’s a small sample. Everybody’s being so cracked up about Vegas, keep bringing up Vegas, it was two games. We took care of that business, that was the In-Season Tournament, we played, we won it, but that’s literally just two games.”
The Lakers have gone 3-10 since those two games in Vegas, with a -6.2 net rating over that stretch. The team’s offense is ranked 23rd in the league over those 13 games, but the bigger concern is the defense — the foundation of this roster and what drives its winning — is 21st in the league over that stretch.
The trouble with the Lakers can be summed up this way: LeBron scored 32 and Anthony Davis 31 against Memphis and the Lakers still lost at home.
The Lakers are 0-2 to start a run where they play 8-of-9 games at home, and if things don’t turn around the pressure will build on GM Rob Pelinka to do something to shake things up at the trade deadline (and that kind of pressure often leads to the worst decisions).
