The Los Angeles Lakers suffered their most disappointing loss of the season on Friday night as they let the San Antonio Spurs, who had lost 18 straight, beat them wire to wire.
After sitting out Wednesday’s win over the Spurs, LeBron James returned to action on Friday although he was without most of his fellow starters as Anthony Davis, D’Angelo Russell and Cam Reddish all were unable to play.
After the loss, James recognized how shorthanded the Lakers were but also made sure to credit the Spurs for playing so well, via Spectrum SportsNet:
“Our team is not built to have three starters out. But you give credit where credit is due, San Antonio played great tonight. They shot the ball extremely well. They attacked us, and we were just limited with bodies.”
December has been a tough month for the Lakers as there has been a lot of travel with the extra game from the In-Season Tournament playing a role in that.
The Lakers are still playing good basketball when they have all their key guys, so James knows they just need to get everyone in the lineup to be successful:
“We just got to get healthy. When we’re healthy, we’re one of the better teams in the league. When we’re not, we’ve had some ups and downs. I’ve said it over and over, when we’re healthy and have our group, we can compete versus anybody.”
Things don’t get any easier for the Lakers moving forward after wrapping up their Texas road trip. They return home for a game on Monday night against the New York Knicks but then quickly head back on the road to play the Chicago Bulls, Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder before returning home for Christmas.
LeBron touched on the challenging stretch ahead and what it will take for the Lakers to build some momentum during that time:
“It’s tough. It’s definitely a grind. We feel like we’ve been on the road pretty much all year. But like I said, health is wealth. It challenging to go home for a couple days and then head right back east and then go back to the midwest and head back to OKC or whatever the case may be. That’s gonna be challenging on us so we got to mentally and physically prepare ours bodies by getting our sleep, get our nutrition and hydrate, whatever you got to do to refuel because the games are gonna continue to come.”
As James noted, the Lakers have shown that they can play with anyone when they’re healthy so hopefully guys can return to the lineup as soon as Monday.
Darvin Ham provides Lakers injury updates
After the loss to the Spurs, Lakers head coach Darvin Ham provided injury updates on Davis, Russell, Reddish and Gabe Vincent and sounded optimistic that all could be available to play against the Knicks.
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