darthska
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**LA LAKERS THREAD** Sitting on 17! 2023-2024 offseason begins
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by licensed to ball,
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NT’ers now putting out diss tracks on Russ
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****** are corny
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MVP
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We got 34 games remaining. Health withstanding, 23-11 over that stretch. I still believe.
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need AD to average 23 and 11
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He was basically doing that before he got hurt. Getting my Shaq on, need 27 and 12 with 2 blocks per.
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AD, Bron & Russ have played an equivalent of 6 games together in minutes this season and worse most of those sharing the floor with DJ. Hopefully with Monk, Reaves, and Stanley's emergence now; Vogel can go outside himself and actually put complimentary pieces out there with them.
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Next 34. My prediction: 19-15. First round exit
Of course ive been wrong plenty: like that time I called the Russ trade horrible…said shroeder wasn’t it last year, said this teams roster makeup is bad last summer. Hope I’m wrong again.
Of course ive been wrong plenty: like that time I called the Russ trade horrible…said shroeder wasn’t it last year, said this teams roster makeup is bad last summer. Hope I’m wrong again.
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Yea that jumper is going to have to start falling with more regularity for sure. He was working on it a lot during his rehab so we'll see.
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A victory tonight would be GREAT, but not falling behind by 20-30 would be a moral win for me.
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Easy W tonight
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19-15 sounds about right given what I’ve seen from AD and Russ this season
But if AD comes back like a beast then ya anything is possible
But if AD comes back like a beast then ya anything is possible
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The Los Angeles Lakers and Russell Westbrook are stuck inside their own grand experiment
By this point in the season, Russell Westbrook has his routes to and from Crypto.com Arena choreographed perfectly. He leaves home at the same time every day, takes the same route, warms up at the same time, in the same way, ending with the same corner 3. Leaving the arena and heading back to his wife and three children at their house in Brentwood, California, follows a similar structure -- which Westbrook has long since decided is essential to his life.
Last Wednesday night, that carefully constructed structure was upended.
Just an hour or so earlier, Los Angeles Lakers coach Frank Vogel had yanked Westbrook from the game with 3:52 remaining, benching him for the end of L.A.'s 111-104 loss to the Indiana Pacers, the Lakers' fourth defeat in five games. To that point, Westbrook had shot 5-for-17, attempted zero free throws and had too many defensive breakdowns to count. "Playing the guys that I thought were going to win the game," Vogel said after the game on the decision to bench the nine-time All Star.
It was a jarring move. Future Hall of Famers don't get benched in unceremonious fashion very often. But future Hall of Famers don't often find themselves in the position of Westbrook and the Lakers.
For weeks, the staff had considered benching Westbrook at a moment like this. Team sources said there was always concern as to how he'd react to such a move. Would he get defensive, as he often had when he felt like he was being singled out in film sessions? Would it erode the confidence that is so important to his game?
When Vogel finally did it, it was as understandable as it was stunning.
"Frank ripped the Band-Aid off," one team source said.
No one was quite sure what would happen next. But the time had come for drastic action. The experiment of teaming Westbrook with LeBron James and Anthony Davis has been a flop -- more awkward and clunky than even the skeptics predicted over the summer, when the Lakers traded Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Montrezl Harrell and the 2021 No. 22 pick for Westbrook and his $44 million contract.
The Lakers' offense has been poor, ranking No. 24 in the league despite having four players recently named to the NBA's list of the 75 best players of all time.
And the Lakers' No. 19-ranked defense is unrecognizable from the top-rated defense in the league last season -- and from the No. 3 defense that formed the backbone of the 2020 NBA championship team.
Westbrook, as usual, seems to be at the center of every cause and potential solution to the dysfunction.
He certainly isn't the Lakers' only issue. L.A. has gotten very little from DeAndre Jordan, Trevor Ariza, Kent Bazemore and Wayne Ellington -- veterans brought in by Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka to support the Lakers' star trio -- not nearly enough from youngster Talen Horton-Tucker and nothing at all from Kendrick Nunn.
But Westbrook is the most polarizing. And because the Lakers traded away virtually all the assets they had to improve the team to acquire the three superstars this team revolves around, this trio is stuck with one another. It's too expensive to get divorced. That it's even a conversation now, 47 games into the grandest of experiments, is an indictment itself.
As one Lakers insider said, "There is no light at the end of the tunnel."
Others inside the organization are more patient, leaning on Westbrook's long history of improving his play throughout the season as he adjusts to new surroundings and pointing to the mere 15 games that James, Davis and Westbrook have spent on the court together because of injuries.
But whether fatalist or optimist, everyone agrees on this: James, Davis and Westbrook wanted to play together, and there's no other option but for them to figure out how to do that.
"It's not like [Westbrook's] a tradable player where if it's not working out you just move on; everybody in the NBA knows that," one team source said. "So it's got to work. This is the only option. There is no Plan B for this season."
Westbrook left the arena Wednesday night without speaking to the media. He was willing to speak, but a team staffer told him he didn't have to. So he left in a way wholly different than any other night he'd left the arena this season.
He needed to process what had just happened and what it meant not only for the rest of this season but the rest of his career.
Is this who he was now? The aging superstar who gets pulled at the end of games? Or was this just a bad night and a bold move by a coach on the hot seat?
It was nearly midnight, and the Lakers were scheduled to fly to Orlando, Florida, at 10 the next morning. But he needed to talk to someone, so he called his brother, Ray, who often serves as a sounding board.
They talked late into the night. Then Westbrook got up early to see his kids before leaving on a long, seven-game road trip.
"There's always another game," a friend said. "And he's going to be ready."
People who know Westbrook, even in vastly different contexts, tend to say that about him.
Earlier this season, Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, who coached Westbrook for four seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder, went out of his way to say this:
"As a coach, I never took for granted that you never have to worry about that guy coming ready to play. Ever. He's ready. There's going to be more positives than negatives. Sometimes when he's playing with new guys, some of the turnovers and things like that, [are] just a product of him getting more comfortable with people he's playing with and figuring out where he can kind of do what he does. But you want him aggressive, you want him attacking; that's who he is and what's made him the player he is."
Donovan can say that because of how well he knows Westbrook. But no one on the Lakers had much history with him. They had played against him at the peak of his powers, but that's different than the bond and trust that comes with playing together.
It's fair to wonder how much adding Westbrook's longtime coach, Scott Brooks, to Vogel's staff could have helped the 33-year-old guard's acclimation to the team. Brooks ended up getting a more lucrative offer to coach alongside Chauncey Billups with the Portland Trail Blazers.
Those who know him best say Westbrook thrives in environments where he feels a sense of control.
His best years were when his team and the organization revolved around him and adapted to him. He liked the pressure that came with that. In some ways, it was easier to have everything on him than share responsibilities with another superstar, whom he could not control.
Over the past few years, Westbrook has not had that control, however. He has joined someone else's team and had to learn how to exist in their universe: first, James Harden with the Houston Rockets; then, Bradley Beal on the Washington Wizards; now, James and Davis in Los Angeles.
After Westbrook was benched, Pelinka knew the situation was at a critical juncture, so he met with Westbrook for nearly two hours when the team landed in Orlando on Thursday, according to team sources.
Vogel too has met individually with Westbrook several times throughout the season to try to find ways to help him feel more comfortable and succeed on the court, according to team sources.
James and Davis speak to him regularly, as well.
"Constantly," one team source said. "They're talking to Russ constantly."
By this point in the season, though, everyone involved hoped those conversations would be more productive.
Because, really, the ones with James and Davis have been ongoing since the summer. The recruiting meetings among the superstar trio (which also included former Lakers forward Jared Dudley) are well-chronicled by now.
After bowing out in the first round of the playoffs last season, James and Davis were casting a net for a new co-star. They'd each suffered serious injuries during the 2020-21 campaign and felt it was imperative to add a third star to help carry the team if one or both of them went down again. There was also the notion that James was going to turn 37 in December and would prefer to have a secondary playmaker to ease the load on him.
Besides Westbrook, they met with Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard and then-free agent DeMar DeRozan.
Westbrook was both the most aggressive suitor and the most realistic star for the Lakers to land. Plus, he said all the right things when James and Davis pressed him on how he'd approach such a new role.
Statistically and individually, Westbrook told them he felt he'd done everything in his NBA career. All that was left to accomplish was win a title. And doing so in Los Angeles, where he could see his family every day, meant so much to him at this stage in his life.
He'd never played with someone as accomplished as James and was excited to learn from him. If things got rough, he'd lean on him.
Westbrook seemed to be leaning into the experience early on. Friends noticed him changing some of his routines to sync with James. Instead of training by himself at UCLA or a gym in Burbank he'd found, Westbrook often trained with James and Davis to get a jump on team building. In the evenings, their families would meet up for dinners and activities.
Even before the season started, all three seemed to understand it was on them to make this experiment succeed.
The options seemed endless: Westbrook would be the secondary playmaker when playing with James and the primary playmaker without him. Westbrook could cut when he was off the ball, taking advantage of all the space created by the gravitational pull created by James and Davis. He could play pick-and-roll with each of them.
Very quickly, several problems emerged: (1) There was not enough spacing when the Lakers played two non-shooters in Westbrook and either center -- Dwight Howard or Jordan. (2) The Lakers' perimeter defense was atrocious after the trade of Caldwell-Pope and the free-agent loss of Alex Caruso, and outside of James and Davis, they didn't have the type of versatile defenders to make up for it. (3) James missed 10 games in the first month then Davis missed 20 games, each time forcing Westbrook to adapt to a different style. (4) Westbrook has not been nearly as effective with the non-James lineups as expected (a minus-5.7 net rating when James is off the court), which led to the recent decision to cut Westbrook's minutes with the bench groups.
All of which has led to endless debate about where the Lakers went wrong, both internally and externally. Some believe the roster construction around the three superstars has been the fatal flaw. Others believe the idea of Westbrook changing his style of play so dramatically, this late in his career, was naive.
A series of listless losses throughout the season have put the onus on Vogel at several points, most recently last week when the team contemplated whether a midseason change could jump-start the team. Ultimately, the Lakers decided against replacing Vogel, for the time being at least, multiple sources said, because no one believes changing the coach will yield dramatically different results.
Still, James, Davis and Westbrook are supporting one another publicly. There have been occasional comments about excess turnovers and inconsistent defense but no direct or passive-aggressive finger-pointing -- yet.
Westbrook has seemed to put attention on cutting down his turnovers in recent weeks (averaging 1.4 since his nine-turnover game on Jan. 2). Davis is close to returning from a sprained MCL that has kept him out since Dec. 17. And James is still as good as ever, averaging 31.2 points since turning 37 on Dec. 30.
The Lakers will try to make an impact move before the Feb. 10 trade deadline, but behind the scenes, team sources are managing expectations of what can realistically be done.
This team might become something else in time. But the answers either lie within or there are none.
By this point in the season, Russell Westbrook has his routes to and from Crypto.com Arena choreographed perfectly. He leaves home at the same time every day, takes the same route, warms up at the same time, in the same way, ending with the same corner 3. Leaving the arena and heading back to his wife and three children at their house in Brentwood, California, follows a similar structure -- which Westbrook has long since decided is essential to his life.
Last Wednesday night, that carefully constructed structure was upended.
Just an hour or so earlier, Los Angeles Lakers coach Frank Vogel had yanked Westbrook from the game with 3:52 remaining, benching him for the end of L.A.'s 111-104 loss to the Indiana Pacers, the Lakers' fourth defeat in five games. To that point, Westbrook had shot 5-for-17, attempted zero free throws and had too many defensive breakdowns to count. "Playing the guys that I thought were going to win the game," Vogel said after the game on the decision to bench the nine-time All Star.
It was a jarring move. Future Hall of Famers don't get benched in unceremonious fashion very often. But future Hall of Famers don't often find themselves in the position of Westbrook and the Lakers.
For weeks, the staff had considered benching Westbrook at a moment like this. Team sources said there was always concern as to how he'd react to such a move. Would he get defensive, as he often had when he felt like he was being singled out in film sessions? Would it erode the confidence that is so important to his game?
When Vogel finally did it, it was as understandable as it was stunning.
"Frank ripped the Band-Aid off," one team source said.
No one was quite sure what would happen next. But the time had come for drastic action. The experiment of teaming Westbrook with LeBron James and Anthony Davis has been a flop -- more awkward and clunky than even the skeptics predicted over the summer, when the Lakers traded Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Montrezl Harrell and the 2021 No. 22 pick for Westbrook and his $44 million contract.
The Lakers' offense has been poor, ranking No. 24 in the league despite having four players recently named to the NBA's list of the 75 best players of all time.
And the Lakers' No. 19-ranked defense is unrecognizable from the top-rated defense in the league last season -- and from the No. 3 defense that formed the backbone of the 2020 NBA championship team.
Westbrook, as usual, seems to be at the center of every cause and potential solution to the dysfunction.
He certainly isn't the Lakers' only issue. L.A. has gotten very little from DeAndre Jordan, Trevor Ariza, Kent Bazemore and Wayne Ellington -- veterans brought in by Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka to support the Lakers' star trio -- not nearly enough from youngster Talen Horton-Tucker and nothing at all from Kendrick Nunn.
But Westbrook is the most polarizing. And because the Lakers traded away virtually all the assets they had to improve the team to acquire the three superstars this team revolves around, this trio is stuck with one another. It's too expensive to get divorced. That it's even a conversation now, 47 games into the grandest of experiments, is an indictment itself.
As one Lakers insider said, "There is no light at the end of the tunnel."
Others inside the organization are more patient, leaning on Westbrook's long history of improving his play throughout the season as he adjusts to new surroundings and pointing to the mere 15 games that James, Davis and Westbrook have spent on the court together because of injuries.
But whether fatalist or optimist, everyone agrees on this: James, Davis and Westbrook wanted to play together, and there's no other option but for them to figure out how to do that.
"It's not like [Westbrook's] a tradable player where if it's not working out you just move on; everybody in the NBA knows that," one team source said. "So it's got to work. This is the only option. There is no Plan B for this season."
Westbrook left the arena Wednesday night without speaking to the media. He was willing to speak, but a team staffer told him he didn't have to. So he left in a way wholly different than any other night he'd left the arena this season.
He needed to process what had just happened and what it meant not only for the rest of this season but the rest of his career.
Is this who he was now? The aging superstar who gets pulled at the end of games? Or was this just a bad night and a bold move by a coach on the hot seat?
It was nearly midnight, and the Lakers were scheduled to fly to Orlando, Florida, at 10 the next morning. But he needed to talk to someone, so he called his brother, Ray, who often serves as a sounding board.
They talked late into the night. Then Westbrook got up early to see his kids before leaving on a long, seven-game road trip.
"There's always another game," a friend said. "And he's going to be ready."
People who know Westbrook, even in vastly different contexts, tend to say that about him.
Earlier this season, Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, who coached Westbrook for four seasons with the Oklahoma City Thunder, went out of his way to say this:
"As a coach, I never took for granted that you never have to worry about that guy coming ready to play. Ever. He's ready. There's going to be more positives than negatives. Sometimes when he's playing with new guys, some of the turnovers and things like that, [are] just a product of him getting more comfortable with people he's playing with and figuring out where he can kind of do what he does. But you want him aggressive, you want him attacking; that's who he is and what's made him the player he is."
Donovan can say that because of how well he knows Westbrook. But no one on the Lakers had much history with him. They had played against him at the peak of his powers, but that's different than the bond and trust that comes with playing together.
It's fair to wonder how much adding Westbrook's longtime coach, Scott Brooks, to Vogel's staff could have helped the 33-year-old guard's acclimation to the team. Brooks ended up getting a more lucrative offer to coach alongside Chauncey Billups with the Portland Trail Blazers.
Those who know him best say Westbrook thrives in environments where he feels a sense of control.
His best years were when his team and the organization revolved around him and adapted to him. He liked the pressure that came with that. In some ways, it was easier to have everything on him than share responsibilities with another superstar, whom he could not control.
Over the past few years, Westbrook has not had that control, however. He has joined someone else's team and had to learn how to exist in their universe: first, James Harden with the Houston Rockets; then, Bradley Beal on the Washington Wizards; now, James and Davis in Los Angeles.
After Westbrook was benched, Pelinka knew the situation was at a critical juncture, so he met with Westbrook for nearly two hours when the team landed in Orlando on Thursday, according to team sources.
Vogel too has met individually with Westbrook several times throughout the season to try to find ways to help him feel more comfortable and succeed on the court, according to team sources.
James and Davis speak to him regularly, as well.
"Constantly," one team source said. "They're talking to Russ constantly."
By this point in the season, though, everyone involved hoped those conversations would be more productive.
Because, really, the ones with James and Davis have been ongoing since the summer. The recruiting meetings among the superstar trio (which also included former Lakers forward Jared Dudley) are well-chronicled by now.
After bowing out in the first round of the playoffs last season, James and Davis were casting a net for a new co-star. They'd each suffered serious injuries during the 2020-21 campaign and felt it was imperative to add a third star to help carry the team if one or both of them went down again. There was also the notion that James was going to turn 37 in December and would prefer to have a secondary playmaker to ease the load on him.
Besides Westbrook, they met with Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard and then-free agent DeMar DeRozan.
Westbrook was both the most aggressive suitor and the most realistic star for the Lakers to land. Plus, he said all the right things when James and Davis pressed him on how he'd approach such a new role.
Statistically and individually, Westbrook told them he felt he'd done everything in his NBA career. All that was left to accomplish was win a title. And doing so in Los Angeles, where he could see his family every day, meant so much to him at this stage in his life.
He'd never played with someone as accomplished as James and was excited to learn from him. If things got rough, he'd lean on him.
Westbrook seemed to be leaning into the experience early on. Friends noticed him changing some of his routines to sync with James. Instead of training by himself at UCLA or a gym in Burbank he'd found, Westbrook often trained with James and Davis to get a jump on team building. In the evenings, their families would meet up for dinners and activities.
Even before the season started, all three seemed to understand it was on them to make this experiment succeed.
The options seemed endless: Westbrook would be the secondary playmaker when playing with James and the primary playmaker without him. Westbrook could cut when he was off the ball, taking advantage of all the space created by the gravitational pull created by James and Davis. He could play pick-and-roll with each of them.
Very quickly, several problems emerged: (1) There was not enough spacing when the Lakers played two non-shooters in Westbrook and either center -- Dwight Howard or Jordan. (2) The Lakers' perimeter defense was atrocious after the trade of Caldwell-Pope and the free-agent loss of Alex Caruso, and outside of James and Davis, they didn't have the type of versatile defenders to make up for it. (3) James missed 10 games in the first month then Davis missed 20 games, each time forcing Westbrook to adapt to a different style. (4) Westbrook has not been nearly as effective with the non-James lineups as expected (a minus-5.7 net rating when James is off the court), which led to the recent decision to cut Westbrook's minutes with the bench groups.
All of which has led to endless debate about where the Lakers went wrong, both internally and externally. Some believe the roster construction around the three superstars has been the fatal flaw. Others believe the idea of Westbrook changing his style of play so dramatically, this late in his career, was naive.
A series of listless losses throughout the season have put the onus on Vogel at several points, most recently last week when the team contemplated whether a midseason change could jump-start the team. Ultimately, the Lakers decided against replacing Vogel, for the time being at least, multiple sources said, because no one believes changing the coach will yield dramatically different results.
Still, James, Davis and Westbrook are supporting one another publicly. There have been occasional comments about excess turnovers and inconsistent defense but no direct or passive-aggressive finger-pointing -- yet.
Westbrook has seemed to put attention on cutting down his turnovers in recent weeks (averaging 1.4 since his nine-turnover game on Jan. 2). Davis is close to returning from a sprained MCL that has kept him out since Dec. 17. And James is still as good as ever, averaging 31.2 points since turning 37 on Dec. 30.
The Lakers will try to make an impact move before the Feb. 10 trade deadline, but behind the scenes, team sources are managing expectations of what can realistically be done.
This team might become something else in time. But the answers either lie within or there are none.
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Heard someone say: “be careful about trading Russ to Houston bc he will get bought out and probably sign with the clippers!”
Lol go ahead. I dare you
Lol go ahead. I dare you
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- Apr 24, 2006
Lmao he’s the one guy we actually want the clippers to take
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- Jan 18, 2006
IF true...SMH
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No wonder there ain’t no continuity
Ain’t no accountability.
Ain’t no accountability.
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Let’s hope my man doesn’t break again
