It’s tempting to look at this year’s Los Angeles Lakers team and pencil them in for another trip to the NBA Finals. The Lakers have two of the five or so best players alive in Anthony Davis and LeBron James back again, they won a title last seaon … what’s supposed to stop them?
Yet the team’s opening night loss to crosstown rivals the Clippers made something abundantly clear — this is a very new Lakers team, and they need time to figure out how to play together.
The headlines from the opening night game were about Paul George, who looked fantastic for the Clippers, scoring 33 points in their 116-109 win. But watching the game, and reading the box score this morning, I was left with a different takeaway — The Clippers went all out, and the Lakers were experimenting a LOT last night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcVI7qlgBF4
What do I mean by experimenting? Let’s look at the minutes breakdown. You can learn a lot about last night’s game purely looking at the number of minutes that different players on each team played.
The Clippers played effectively a nine-man rotation in Tuesday night’s game, with a steady dispersal of minutes to their nine guys. (The four guys at the end of the bench got between one and three minutes in garbage time, but this was a nine-man rotation.) This makes sense for what the Clippers viewed this game as: A chance to make a statement against one of the best teams in the league, their rivals, on opening night.
They played their best nine guys significant minutes and went for it, and they won.
The Lakers, on the other hand, treated this like a standard, early regular season game. They played 11 players for at least ten minutes on Tuesday. They only dressed 12. The entire team got a run in, minus Quinn Cook who only got a minute in garbage time.
Yeah, LeBron and AD played a lot, of course, and coach Frank Vogel seems to be trusting new big man Montrezl Harrell who joined from the Clippers this offseason and played 32 minutes in the game. But Marc Gasol got 12 minutes to shake the dust off. New man Talen Horton-Tucker got a bit of a run, as did Wesley Matthews. Dennis Schroder got plenty of minutes.
If you’re giving 11 players significant minutes in a game that isn’t a total blowout, that tells me one of two things:
- You have no idea who your good players are, so you’re just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks
- You’re so confident in your team that you’re using nationally televised games against rivals to experiment with lineups
Call me crazy, but I think we’re looking at the second option with the Lakers. Per Basketball Reference, the Lakers tried out 15 different 5-man rotations during the game — only three of those lineups featured LeBron and AD on the court at the same time.
The Lakers have a new team, with plenty of new faces, and need time to figure out exactly who they are. They treated the opening night game as a chance to do that. I wouldn’t read too much into the loss if you’re a Lakers fan — this is a team that’s not getting too hyped up about an early season game, even if it’s a nationally televised rivalry game.
In this shortened season, they only have 72 games to figure out who their playoff lineups are. The Lakers aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out what those are.
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