There are no must-wins in January.
For the Los Angeles Lakers, this was close.
The first half of the season has been a rocky one in Laker-land. A sub. 500 record, a coach on the hot seat and a roster maligned for its ineffectiveness. “We just suck right now,” was how LeBron James assessed the team after Friday’s loss to Memphis. And James wasn’t getting any arguments.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Clippers played the role of road team in Crypto.com Arena and boy, this could have gotten ugly. The Clippers had won five straight, 14 of their last 16 and, behind the law firm of Leonard, Harden and George, looked like a title contender. Instead it was the Lakers making big plays, coming away with a badly needed 106–103 win.
This was no masterpiece. The first half was ugly. The Lakers committed 10 turnovers. The Clippers shot 43% from the floor. D’Angelo Russell was 0–4 from three-point range. The only Clipper who appeared ready to play was Ivica Zubac, who scored 14 points in the half. The road team led by four.
In the second half, the Lakers woke up. The sharpest critique of LA this season is that the supporting cast around James and Anthony Davis has been subpar. On Sunday, they were better. Russell made three threes in the second half. Christian Wood had nine points off the bench. Max Christie chipped in seven. James (25 points) still led the way but nine Lakers scored against the Clippers, four in double figures.
“It takes the others to win championships and win basketball games,” said Davis. “These guys played phenomenal tonight. When these guys are playing well it just makes me and ‘Bron’s job a lot easier.”
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Said Darvin Ham: “Once everyone pitches in and does their job as long as they can, as best as they can, good things usually happen. And that’s what you saw out there tonight. A well-balanced win.”
Even with “the others” performing, this game still came down to the last possession. With 2:47 to play and the Lakers up three, Clippers coach Ty Lue subbed Kawhi Leonard out (Lue later explained that Leonard was nearing his minutes limit and the Clippers were on the first end of a back-to-back). The two teams traded buckets down the stretch, with Leonard returning to assist on a Zubac layup. A Norman Powell three that would have forced overtime rimmed out.
The Lakers will take the win. These days they will take any win. It pushed LA into sole possession of the final play-in spot in the Western Conference and stopped—for now—some of the bleeding the team has done since winning the in-season tournament.
“We got to continue to get better,” said James. “Try to use this to try to catapult a little bit better play from us. But it still don't take away from the fact of how we've been playing the last 11, 12 games. Tonight was a good start. Hopefully we could start from here and continue to build.”
Not bad for morale, either.
“It doesn’t fix everything obviously, but it helps,” James said. “But we got to still learn from the wins more than we learn from the losses. When you lose, you’re able to look at, ‘Okay, this is why we lost, okay, we got to do this better, we got to do this.’ And then when you win, the first human instinct is to do it like, ‘Oh, we won. Okay.’ But no, we have to learn from the mistakes we had tonight, which we had too many still, so we got to learn from this tomorrow.”
The Lakers have a lot to work on. An anemic offense won’t get fixed overnight. They need Wood and Christie to be reliable contributors. They need Russell to shoot like he did in the second half for the entire game. They need the vanishing act that Austin Reaves has done at times this season to happen less frequently.
On Sunday, against the Clippers, the Lakers played more like the team we saw in the second half of last season.
On Tuesday, against the Raptors, they will have to do it again.
