The Los Angeles Lakers are finding themselves in an unfortunately familiar spot through 35 games of the 2023-24 campaign. Despite elite play from Anthony Davis and relative health for both him and LeBron James, the Lakers are below .500 as they near the midpoint of the regular season.
In 2022-23, the Lakers were 14-21 through 35 games. At that point, they rattled off a five-game winning streak and never fell that far below .500 again.
Things aren’t quite as dire this season, as the Lakers are three games better at 17-18. However, they have fewer means to completely overhaul their roster at the trade deadline and make significant personnel improvements. If the Lakers are going to get back on track, it will likely need to be from internal improvement.
Davis, who has been nothing short of incredible this season despite the losing, believes the Lakers can use some of the mentality from last season to help alleviate the recent struggles.
“Last year obviously was a bigger hole for us as far as record,” Davis said. “We went to the Western Conference Finals after that but we can’t bring up last year. Different team. But what I can say is to just play. We just competed. And we got to do the same thing now.
“We’re one game under .500 and we just got to compete, play hard and go out with a mindset of a must-win mentality, and hopefully that can propel us over to get back to .500 on Friday and then kind of put a streak together at home. I mean, we’ve been a really good home team thus far, and we got an opportunity to continue to build on that. But if we play how we played tonight, then it’s going to go south for us really bad.”
Davis admitted that the Lakers are at somewhat of a make-or-break point given the way they’ve been playing. While it might be too early to look at the standings, the Lakers are barely clinging on to a Play-In Tournament spot at the No. 10 seed and are four games back of the No. 6 seed.
If the Lakers don’t want that gap to get any wider, they have to find a way to turn things around now. Looking back to 2022-23 for motivation is the way Davis believes they can do that.
Anthony Davis: Lakers can’t make excuses
Davis spoke candidly about the way the Lakers have been playing and what they need to do to turn things around as quickly as possible.
“Whatever it takes to win,” Davis responded when asked about the message in the Lakers’ locker room. “Every game for us, especially on this homestand, should feel like a must-win for us to get back into the win column and then just build off of it.
“Nothing is going to be easy for us. We got a couple great teams coming up, so we got to figure it out. Especially on the defensive end with our attention to detail, guys locking in on the film, and our personnel, and what to do in coverages. It seems like there’s been a lot of slippage in those areas of focus and it’s reflecting on the floor.”
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