It could not have gone any worse for the Los Angeles Lakers on Sunday night when they were thoroughly thrashed against the Phoenix Suns.
The Lakers were outplayed and outexecuted right from the jump and failed to respond to a Suns team looking like they had something to prove. LeBron James was brilliant offensively, but he was not enough to carry a defense that gave up nearly 80 points in the first half.
Despite the embarrassing loss, Malik Monk emphasized the Lakers just need to move on and think about their next game.
“The game is over with, so we got to focus on tomorrow now,” Monk said. “We got to throw that one out the window because we know what went wrong, everybody does. Just like every time we lose like that, you got to throw it out the window.
“There’s bad things that happened, but you really just got to throw it our the window because you got the next game and you can’t worry about what you did last game so we just got to focus on tomorrow and Toronto.”
The defeat to Phoenix marked the tenth consecutive road loss for Los Angeles and Monk cited a lack of urgency as the theme.
“We come out flat. Like I said, we have no sense of urgency getting back on the defensive end. Sometime we settle for one-pass shots, no-pass shots and then we hang our heads and don’t get back on the defensive end and so we just come out flat a little too much on the road and we dig ourselves a hole that we can’t get back from sometimes so we got to do a better job.”
As far as how to fix the issue, Monk acknowledged its difficult and even admitted he and the team are not exerting the necessary effort to solve things. “It’s hard right now, because like he said, we’ve had 10 road losses in a row and everybody is tired of it. We all talk about it, we all say the things, we just got to go out there and do the right things and just play with a sense of urgency and actually just try.
“Sometimes I don’t think we try enough, including myself. So yeah, we just got to get it together, that’s all I got to say. I’m sick of saying that shit though.”
Monk’s assessment of the roster is right on the money, but fortunately they have a chance to fix things quickly when the Toronto Raptors come in to town on Monday.
Monk reveals Frank Vogel’s message in timeouts
The Laker defense to start the night was atrocious, prompting head coach Frank Vogel to call multiple timeouts. Monk revealed that Vogel preached more urgency from the group in the breaks.
“More urgency on the defensive end. We were giving up way too many easy buckets and he was stressing that. I can’t tell you why we didn’t apply all the things we went over and things we knew we were supposed to do, but he was just telling us we got to have a higher sense of urgency.”
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