There is no beating around the bush when it comes to the Los Angeles Lakers’ performance against the Philadelphia 76ers. Darvin Ham’s team was dominated at every level and the result was a 44-point loss that everyone would like to forget.
The Lakers showed a little fight to start the second half, cutting their deficit down to 11, but were unable to get it closer and the fourth quarter was an absolute embarrassment. When describing what led to the outcome, Ham believes his team let some adversity get to them and feels the Lakers ultimately dropped their heads when things began to get out of hand, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Teams are gonna come out and swing with their hardest punch, especially when they’re playing against the Lakers. But if it’s a miscue, I feel like we let some in-game adversity, whether it was some calls that didn’t go our way, some shots we normally make, we got some great looks in that first quarter that didn’t go down. We said it before the game, this team puts you in the position where you got to give multiple efforts and you got to have a next-play mentality. They have championship aspirations, so do we. But in the short-term your competitive spirit has to be at a high level, almost has to be bulletproof to a certain degree because things are gonna happen in an NBA game, it’s a game built on runs.
“So when a team is pushing, we came out great and they started making their run you have to buckle down and meet force with force. And I thought, at different segments they out-hustled us, got some offensive rebounds and they made some shots and I thought we kinda dropped our heads a little bit. We’re dealing with a lot of adversity right now with injuries and the like, but I’m not making excuses. We showed during different moments in that game that we had enough to do what we needed to do, it just wasn’t consistent enough.”
Sometimes things don’t always go your way on the court. Calls don’t get called and shots aren’t falling, but the great teams keep pushing and the Lakers didn’t do that on this night which led to things getting worse.
But Ham would give credit to the 76ers and their two stars Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey, in particular, while also adding that Philadelphia was just more forceful than his Lakers:
“Trying to contain Maxey is like trying to contain a Lamborghini. He’s running around, off the ball, pick-and-roll, transition, he makes you guard every level within your defense. Every different situation you have to be on point with your energy and your vision as well. And then you have Embiid that’s gonna collapse your defense and that is really, I think an underrated passer and knows how to find his teammates, thus the triple-double today.
But salute to them, they played really well, they were hitting on all cylinders, some guys for them made shots that hadn’t been making shots up to this point, and they played with a ton of force. We did, but not enough. Not enough portions of the game, it was spotty at best.”
Whatever the reason was for this massive loss, the Lakers need to right the ship and get back on track. That onus will be on Darvin Ham as the team looks to erase this game from memory and make some improvements moving forward.
Anthony Davis believes Lakers need to ‘flush’ away performance vs. 76ers
Lakers star Anthony Davis undoubtedly feels this is one game in which it is best to move on from as quickly as possible.
The big man noted that the team will watch film and acknowledge and own where they failed against the 76ers. But with a back-to-back to finish this road trip coming up, it is best for the Lakers to simply flush away this performance and move on after that session is done.
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