The Los Angeles Lakers‘ 3-0 start to the season has quickly become a 3-2 start after they lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers 110-134 tonight. Back-to-back losses aren’t ideal for any team, especially for the Lakers who seem to have lost some of the momentum they opened the season with.
Head coach JJ Redick addressed the loss during the post-game press conference, lamenting the mistakes that led to it.
“They’re a really good basketball team. They spread you out and they’ve got guys with some pop with Garland and Mitchell, certainly Levert, and Ty Jerome played great. We kinda got punched in the mouth a little bit.”
“When you play a good basketball team, you can’t afford a lot of mistakes. We made a lot of mistakes, simple stuff sometimes, low-man, rotations, not executing our switches early. They did a lot of things to force us into those mistakes but when you play a good basketball team, you can’t make that many mistakes.”
Redick eloquently broke down how their loss was a mathematical inevitability given the Cavs’ superior creation and the Lakers’ weakest effort of the season.
“We got down early and couldn’t recover… They had 17 more scoring opportunities, they generated 13 more threes, they beat us +33 in the three-point battle, we had our lowest crash rate of the season, we had our highest limbo rate of the season, it’s not a winnable game if you do those things and turn the ball over 20+ times. You’re not gonna win those games, that’s just math.”
"When you play a good basketball team, you can't make that many mistakes." JJ Redick on tonight's loss. pic.twitter.com/NX3fc5Jp7o
— Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) October 31, 2024
Despite Redick’s criticism of the team’s effort through the statistical results, he defended his players when asked directly about their low effort on the night.
“I don’t know if it was that. Garland and Mitchell off the dribble gave us a lot of problems, so you certainly can ask and want to have more pride on that end of basketball. I don’t think the focus and attention to detail of what we were trying to do was great tonight. It didn’t feel like it was an effort or competitiveness thing, it was kind of a regress.”
The Cavaliers picked up a convincing win to improve their season record to 5-0, led by Evan Mobley (25 PTS, 5 REB), Donovan Mitchell (24 PTS, 7 AST), and Jarrett Allen (20 PTS, 17 REB), who were too much for the Lakers to stop offensively. Darius Garland had a great night as well, dishing 10 assists in the win.
The Lakers were led by LeBron James putting up 26 points, six rebounds, and three assists, with Anthony Davis putting up 22 points and 13 rebounds. The Lakers’ saw a notable regression from high-performing stars such as Rui Hachimura (8 PTS) and Austin Reaves (7 pts) tonight. Dalton Knecht had a great bench outing with 18 points.
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