The Los Angeles Lakers suffered their first home defeat of the season, losing 119-118 to the Orlando Magic in the final seconds of the game.
A defeat like this can be very hard to take. And head coach JJ Redick has a unique way to deal with it. Speaking towards the end of his post-game press conference, Redick revealed that he goes to a very dark place – quite literally, as he goes down to his basement, turns out the lights, and watches game footage.
“I go to a very dark place. Literally, it’s the basement. I turn the lights out and I watch [game] film.”
JJ Redick spoke on a host of different topics during the press conference, which you can read below.
On what went wrong for the Lakers:
“I’m going to have to go rewatch every possession in the last couple of minutes. Overall, I felt comfortable with our execution up until the missed free throws and the Wagner three. I would say don’t quote me on that, but that’s just a general thought right now.”
“I’d have to go look at every possession. I thought we executed our reps, we weren’t conceding layups, we had the timeouts. I didn’t love the thought process and the mindset when Wagner hit the three.”
“We talk all the time about our isos; we don’t want to allow threes in isos. Obviously, late game, especially. The small thing on the last play, we got two options on that play, and we got to one of them. Overall, I’ll live with the execution outside of the missed free throws and the Wagner three.”
On what the Magic did to disrupt them:
“They disrupted the flow, which a zone can do sometimes. They were having a hard time stopping us. To be honest with you, I don’t think it disrupted us for more than a couple of possessions. I know we didn’t score for a stretch there, but we got good shots.”
“Those first couple of possessions weren’t great, took us back a little bit, and then we were able to execute against it. It was just that stretch there, where we struggled to score. And frankly, we just weren’t able to get stops, and if you can’t get stops, then you’re playing against a man in early offense.”
On whether this loss was due to lack of physicality:
“I thought our guys competed and were physical…”
“Every loss is frustrating. We’ve had five losses now, there’s certain losses that you can point to a lack of will, competitiveness, and physicality to start a game… The Phoenix game, and this game, where it comes down to late-game and it can swing on a couple of plays. Frankly, it swung on our missed free throws tonight.”
The Lakers did have a tough night against what was a very game Orlando Magic team. Despite missing All-Star forward Paolo Banchero, the Magic were able to hold on and stay in the game. Despite the strong performances from LeBron James (31 PTS, 10 REB, 7 AST) and Anthony Davis (39 PTS, 9 REB, 3 BLK), the Lakers couldn’t get it done.
Crucially, as Redick mentioned, it came down to the missed free throws late in the game from both LeBron James and Anthony Davis.
This loss highlighted the poor defending of the Lakers, and how they allow teams to come back late in games despite leading. Things need to improve if they hope to compete for a championship this season. With a 10-5 record for the season, the Lakers have had a decent start, and cannot afford to go into a slump now.
The Lakers will hope to bounce back on Saturday night at 10:30 PM EST, as they host the Denver Nuggets in a rematch of their first-round series from the playoffs last season.
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