The Los Angeles Lakers suffered a shocking 118-97 loss to the undermanned Dallas Mavericks on Tuesday at American Airlines Center. The Mavericks romped to victory despite missing both Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, and Lakers head coach JJ Redick was not happy with what he saw. In his postgame press conference, Redick criticized his players for how they defended in Dallas.
Reporter: “JJ was there one thing above others that you saw as the reason for the loss?”
JJ Redick: “I mean obviously, they killed us with any iso stuff. We talked this morning just about not giving up iso threes, we gave two up in the first quarter and then tried to press up a little bit and sometimes we did a decent job of containing the basketball. They made some tough twos and there was a bunch of times we didn’t contain the basketball well. And our basic, shell, day one (defense) just wasn’t good. Low man wasn’t there. If he was there, the weakside rotation wasn’t there. We just couldn’t get stops on that… We played fine in the first half, like it was fine. We were up six with 2:59 to go and Klay (Thompson) comes out and hits three threes and (Spencer) Dinwiddie gets a layup at the end. And then they start the second half on a run, we cut it five and then they made four straight threes. I’m not sure what our rotations were. I’ve never seen us try to execute what we were doing. I haven’t watched the film yet. Just watching it live and talking to the assistants who did watch it on film, we’re not sure what was going on with the shift positioning and the rotations. Never seen it before.”
Reporter: “That second stretch, I think it was (Jaden) Hardy that hits threes from kind of the same spot. Is that what you’re talking about?”
Redick: “Yeah, then hit another one on the right side.”
Reporter: “What should the coverage be on those types of plays when Hardy looks like he was pretty open.”
Redick: “There’s two things that you can do. One is you stay with your own man. So, they were trying to lift (Anthony Davis) and have him be the high guy and then they would cut him out of there. You can stay with your own and the next guy becomes the shift guy or you can just zone up and you take cutters. We did neither. Again, I’ve never seen that coverage before.”
It’s certainly not ideal when the head coach of a team appears puzzled by the players’ actions. Redick’s and his assistants’ message doesn’t seem to have gotten across to the Lakers players in this case and it led to the Mavericks shooting 52.3% from the field and 47.4% from beyond the arc.
Redick brought up the isolations first and Austin Reaves was the one who was getting hunted all night. According to Tim Cato, the Mavericks put Reaves into isolation 15 times. Prior to this, no player was put into isolation more than eight times in a game all season, which gives you an idea of just how much they targeted him. In his postgame press conference, Reaves was asked what he can do when being targeted.
“Just play better defense,” Reaves said. “First half was god awful. Second half I thought was better. But can’t allow that. I was just really bad on both sides of the ball tonight.”
Reaves took accountability but Dorian Finney-Smith felt the team could have done a better job of assisting him. Finney-Smith stated the Lakers needed to be more vocal on defense to give their perimeter defenders the confidence to press up.
“On them iso’s, we got to do a better job of talking behind guys, giving them confidence so defenders can crawl up in ball handlers and force them to the rim,” Finney-Smith said. “And we got AD down there, so we got to use it.”
Anthony Davis declined to speak to the media after the game, but LeBron James did talk. James was told about Redick’s comments at one stage and he felt the players just didn’t do a good job of rotating.
“I felt like they put people in pick-and-roll who they wanted in pick-and-roll and they tried to exploit matchups,” James said. “And when we got into rotations, we didn’t make enough second efforts.”
Well, you will get burned if you don’t consistently give that effort and this game was a fine example of that. It was just a brutal loss for the Lakers, who have now dropped to 20-16 on the season. It will be interesting to see how they respond when they face the Charlotte Hornets at Crypto.com Arena on Thursday at 10:30 PM ET.
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