Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Eh.
He was fine. Shooting was fine. Defense was good (mostly). He was active on the glass, though not exactly crashing the boards. He wasn't as active with the ball in his hands but I think that was by design.
I mean it's really odd to me that people are killing Luka's defense -- LAL scored 95, 94, 104, 113 and 96. They had one genuinely solid game on offense and even in THAT game they shit the bed in the 4th quarter and scored 19 because they ran the starters dry.
Their problem wasn't James. It wasn't Luka's defense. Their problem was that the bench was a ****ing horror show and the design of the offense looked straight of of one of those AAU teams where a guy just has 5 players who are BETTER than everyone else so he lets them dictate the game.
A short roster collapsed when it couldn't and an inexperienced coach demonstrated how inexperienced he was.
And if you want to find a single player to blame (for some odd reason) -- the player is Austin Reaves. He was every bit as bad defensively as Luca but wasn't able to do very much offensively at all. The shot he missed in game 4 was literally as bad a shot as it is possible to miss. And it's why they lost. And that was the story of his series. He finally got tired of being defended and just stopped driving altogether. Rui was easily the 3rd best player on the Lakers and that's just not gonna get it done. Especially when your 5th best player is....man, **** if I know. Reaves was #4 by default. I guess DFS is 5 and he was also bad.
They just sucked. Collectively. As a team, as a staff, and evidently as a front office. They were just ****ing terrible.
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Reaves struggled badly against their length and physicality the entire series. It was noticeable. He was a fraction of the player in that series that he was in the regular season. It certainly does make me doubt whether he can be an actual #3 on a contender; he wasn’t great the previous postseason either.