The Los Angeles Lakers finally seemed to be building some momentum, winning a season-high five straight games, including back-to-back impressive road wins over the Memphis Grizzlies and Milwaukee Bucks.
They continued their road trip against the Indiana Pacers on Friday night, however, and saw that streak come to an end with a disappointing blowout loss. The Pacers have the best offense in the league and play at a very high pace, while the Lakers looked like they had tired legs in the third game in four nights on the road trip.
Anthony Davis led the way for the Lakers with 24 points while LeBron James and Austin Reaves pitched in 16 each, although the team still scored a season-low 90 points. That comes just one week after they scored a season-high 150 on the same Pacers team in L.A.
After the game, James tried to diagnosed what went wrong for the Lakers offensive and looked at their outside shooting after going just 5-for-30 as a team from deep, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Offensively, we didn’t have it going. Obviously we shot horribly from 3. We’ve been shooting the ball exceptionally from the outside over the course of the last few months, but tonight we just didn’t have it.”
When asked if the low scoring output had to do with the Lakers having tired legs or Indiana stepping up its defensive pressure, James looked at both:
“It’s a combination of both. You give credit where credit is due, Indy played well, exceptionally well, they extended their defense. But we were missing some really good looks, turned the ball over a little too much as well.”
Turnovers were another issue for L.A. with 16 on the night and some coming in crucial spots of the game, which James knows needs to be cleaned up:
“It was just careless. You got to be able to focus and play through it. I understand it’s three in four nights, but there’s no excuse for uncharacteristic or unforced turnovers. Some of them where you’re trying to make a play to a teammate or whatever and it gets batted down or it’s an attack turnover, you can be OK with those. But some of the unforced ones, you can never be OK with that.”
Luckily for the Lakers, a lot of the other teams around them in the standings also lost on Friday, so they did not lose much ground.
With three under .500 teams coming up on the schedule to end the road trip though, James and the Lakers know how important this upcoming stretch is if they want to climb up the standings.
Darvin Ham feels Lakers were ‘running in mud’ against Pacers
Lakers head coach Darvin Ham also thought his team looked a bit fatigued in Indiana, stating that he felt like they were ‘running in mud’ in their third game in four nights.
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