As LeBron James gets set to enter his 20th NBA season, his focus is on getting the Los Angeles Lakers back into championship contention after missing the playoff altogether in 2021-22.
Everyone knows last season didn’t go as planned for the Lakers and that started from the jump. The team went winless in the preseason, which set the tone for a poor start to the regular season as well.
James only played two-and-a-half games in the preseason, which didn’t allow him and his new teammates to build much continuity.
Having lived through that, it looks like James understands that he and the Lakers need to do things differently this season. While James would not say exactly how many of the Lakers’ preseason games he plans to play in, he did reveal that it will be more than last year, via Dave McMenamin of ESPN:
“More than I played last year,” James said of his expected preseason workload. “More than I played last year.”
Outside of not wanting to make the same mistake of playing only a few preseason minutes though, James is clearly ready to move on from the disaster that was last season:
“Last year was last year,” James said after practice. “That’s over and done with. It’s about how much work we can put in on a day-to-day basis this year and get better. That’s all that matters.”
All of the reports out of training camp so far have been positive as the Lakers begin a new era with Darvin Ham at the helm.
With a roster full of new and younger players, the Lakers will have a chance to right the ship in 2022-23, although that starts now in the preseason so it’s good to see that they are taking it seriously.
Ham not yet sure how much James will play in preseason
While James knows he will be playing more preseason games this year, exactly how many still remains a mystery. Ham said after Friday’s practice that he still needs to get together with his coaching staff to figure it all out.
“My staff and I, we’ll get to that. We don’t want to go crazy but we also want it to be enough where we can establish a rhythm and be in game-mode, a good rhythm going into the season,” Ham said.
The Lakers kick off their preseason schedule on Monday night when they host the Sacramento Kings at Crypto.com Arena.
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