The OtherArena

[guren]

The Lakers finished the half 0-12 from 3. Fortunately for them, they scored lots of points in the paint, and LeBron is still Lebron.

Here are two things I didn't expect to write at halftime of this game:

- The Blazers would have been in trouble without Sauce Castillo
- JaVale, Rondo, and Hart kept the Lakers in it offensively in the 2nd quarter

glenn

[corrado]

0-2. and possible suspensions for Rondo and Ingram. Not a good start so far.

Most surreal part of that fight was Lance Stephenson playing the peacemaker.

[Steve Yohe]

I'm now a Rondo fan. To me he has become a Laker. Ingram seems to have a problem. He got suckered into a foul & then got mad....then joined into another fight. Kid stuff. I thought it was a fun game to watch. I'm not sure that James hasn't lost a step.--Yohe

[JAG]

LeBron is playing at cruising speed. Feeling things out.

They need another shooter and a big. But this group will be a load to handle in a month.

Jagdip

[corrado]

Ingram suspended 4 games.

Rondo suspended 3 games.

And CP3 was suspended 2 games.

[guren]

That telecast was the highest rated regular season NBA game since the Dubs went for win #73 in April of 2016. So there is that.

[jdw]

General thoughts:

This is more entertaining than we have been in a while.

The roster make up is a mess.

They play hard.

They are going to have to play hard to win most any game in the West... things just aren't going to be easy.

The defense is poor both in rim protection and in three point coverage & close out.

Um... that's a problem since those are the two most efficient areas on the court, and teams have focused on getting good there.

They weren't terribly exposed on the three point defense in the first game since the Blazers aren't a good three point shooting team.

They were kind of lucky that the Rockets are still feeling their ways to their new roster, since last year's Rockets would have torched the living shit out of our three point defense.

The team puts a lot of effort into "team rebounding", but isn't especially good.

Good lord are we a shitty shooting team, with none of the non-Bron roster additions helping in that area at all.

As Jag says, Bron was on cruise most of the time in the first two games.

Part of that is pacing himself given what he knows will be a heavy minute workload over a long seasons.

Part of that is his now standard "mostly indifferent" defense during the regular season.

Part of it is the roster around him doesn't really allow for parts of the best in him: (i) three point shooters that can hit when Bron collapses the defense, and (ii) three point shooters to prevent the defense from always collapsing.

Folks who thought he might triple double for the season because of the kids are wrong... because the kids can shoot out there.

It's not just that they need another rim protector, but they need a smart defensive big who can come off the bench. You don't have to block shots - clogging the middle, sliding to cover for errors, smart enough to re-rotated, etc.

Rondo is fun, but by the end of the year his net value towards actually winning is going to be pretty marginal.

Ingram isn't going to take the next step to being a star unless he can shoot outside like Trevor Ariza over the last six years... which is frankly a modest .366 rather thank Klay/Steph/KD territory. But he's also taking 6 of those a game rather than some of the crappy mid-range stuff Ingram tosses up. This team, and Bron, needs him to quickly get his shit together on that rather than taking just 5 in two games, and missing all of them.

Relative to the rest of the West, the team is going to be roughly what they are now - they will make the other team work hard to beat them, with some of the games in the West breaking their way, and others not. There are going to be nights where the opponent slices their defense to shreds and hits their shots... and it will be ugly. There will be nights where we slice opponents to shreds even without hitting threes. Much of the rest of the West is also dealing with roster shifts. Perhaps not as radical as ours, but most of them will be better in a couple of months as well as they figure out what they have.

Everything being equal (i.e. injuries for each team), we're going to be working hard to get into the last four playoff spots. We're only going to sniff a home court advantage if other contenders for those spots having aerious injuries issues (like Utah did last year), or blow up their teams. Check the breaks on thinking this is a 50 win team.

But...

Yeah, it is more fun than the last few years.

[JAG]

Brutal loss. That one is on LeBron.

Hope they realized Kuzma should be playing 3/4 and Zubac shouldn’t be in the League.

Jagdip

[guren]

What a wild game. The Spurs were up by 8 with just over a minute left in regulation and the Lakers came back to tie with an 8-0 run. The Lakers were up by 6 with less than a minute left in OT and the Spurs finished on a 7-0 run.

[jdw]

The team is a lot of fun.

The West is a bitch. That was a washed up, past it's prime Spurs on the road. Even they are a tough win to get.

[guren]

I found a site that creates live win expectancy graphs. Here is the one for this game. The Spurs controlled just about all of regulation and were around 99% at one point, and the Lakers were near locks towards the end of OT.

[guren]

Today's game summary.

[guren]

"That's why LeBron wanted to sign me."

-- Lance Stephenson (probably)

[jdw]

Wins are nice. :)

[JAG]

Especially over undefeated darlings on the second night of a back-to-back.

Lonzo and Kuzma should start. Interesting quandary with Ingram.

Fun as fuck. They are gonna try to play this fast.

Jagdip