The Los Angeles Lakers suffered one of their biggest defeats of the 2025-26 season on Tuesday, with the San Antonio Spurs blowing them out 136-108 at Crypto.com Arena. The Lakers were expected to lose as they were without many key players, but the manner of the defeat didn’t sit too well with head coach JJ Redick.
Not only were the Lakers outplayed, but the effort wasn’t there on the defensive end, and Redick called out his players in his postgame press conference.
“We got blitzed from the beginning,” Redick said. “… I don’t know the belief level of the guys out there. You have some of these games that you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Oh, I’m going to get more shots tonight,’ and you just come out with zero intent defensively and zero execution. [Victor Wembanyama] blitzed us, and we didn’t execute what we were trying to do.
“And when he didn’t have the ball, and they drove, it was like one-on-one, no help defense,” Redick added. “44 points in the paint in the first half… We could have showed 18 clips of us not playing our defense. So not a lot to take away other than we suck at defense.”
With LeBron James, Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves, Deandre Ayton, and Marcus Smart all being out, a subpar offensive showing by the Lakers here would have been forgiven. They were facing one of the best defensive teams in the NBA, led by Victor Wembanyama, without their three best offensive players and ball-handlers. You’re almost expected to struggle, but they didn’t.
The Lakers went 41-85 (48.2%) from the field and 11-25 (44.0%) from beyond the arc. They weren’t great, but they weren’t terrible. The same cannot be said about what they did on the other end, though.
The Spurs pretty much got whatever they wanted on offense against the Lakers. Wembanyama set the tone early by racking up 25 points in the first quarter. The Frenchman aggressively went at the Lakers, and they simply had no answer.
Wembanyama’s dominance helped the Spurs record 47 points in the first quarter. That should have been a wake-up call for the Lakers, but it wasn’t. The Spurs would put up 37 points in the second quarter to take an 84-55 lead into halftime. For some context on just how bad that is, those 84 points were the most the Lakers had ever allowed in a half in their history.
Now, some of that was down to the Spurs being red-hot on offense, but there were one too many occasions when they were getting easy baskets in transition because the Lakers weren’t getting back fast enough. These role players were given a chance to impress with the big guns being out, and most of them disappointed.
The third quarter would see more of what we had seen in the first half. The Spurs had 31 points in the period, which meant they had racked up 115 in total entering the fourth. They could very well have hit the 150-point mark, but head coach Mitch Johnson decided against playing any of his starters in the fourth quarter.
With Stephon Castle having already exited the game with an injury, Johnson wasn’t going to take any risks, which saved the Lakers from further embarrassment. Wembanyama would finish with 40 points in just 26 minutes, and Redick hailed him as a top-five player in the world. He is undoubtedly incredible, but the Lakers did little to make life difficult for him.
The Lakers dropped to 32-21 with this loss, and it will be interesting to see how they respond to it when they take on the Dallas Mavericks at Crypto.com Arena on Thursday at 10 PM ET.
