The Lakers’ problems don’t start and end with Russell Westbrook

The Los Angeles Lakers started the new season disappointingly, even if it is currently enough for a balanced record. The team’s problems go far beyond the complicated fit of Russell Westbrook – bigger question marks are currently behind the other two superstars.

This was definitely not how the Lakers had imagined their start to the season. There is currently a huge gap between claim and reality, the playoff place (6) with a 12-12 balance is owed to a Western Conference, which is shockingly weak across the board, and one of the easiest fixtures to date. At the moment, nobody would seriously compare the Lakers to top teams like Phoenix or Golden State.

The poster boy for the problems is Russell Westbrook – not by chance. After a weak start, its performance is now absolutely fine; With an average of 20 points, 9 assists and 8 rebounds over the last 15 games, Russ gives his new team exactly what was to be expected, his effective throw rate of 49.6 percent in this period would even be a career over an entire season. High.

Westbrook’s game is not an ideal fit for his new team and has its quirks; he offers no spacing, is not an effective off-ball player, tends to make bad decisions and does not defend with the greatest interest – but that was all foreseeable. You can only partially blame him for not completely reinventing himself for his 14th NBA season.

At most, one can blame the Lakers for apparently hoping for it when they traded house and yard for him. Nevertheless: Westbrook is currently unsuitable as the number one scapegoat in LaLa-Land. Of the Big 3, he’s actually not even the one who is currently causing the greatest concern.

The Lakers are off the title recipe

It’s only been 14 months since the Lakers launched their 17th championship with a very simple equation: They had two of the top ten players in the league in their ranks, including probably the best, and a supporting cast that was above all excellent defended.

The shoot and the offensive in general weren’t outstanding, but it was enough, not least because one of the two superstars in the Orlando Bubble himself took care of the shoot well above career level (see below). Since then there have been two offseasons and the Lakers have strayed astonishingly far from the basic structure of the time.

The conversion culminated in the trade for Westbrook, in which the Lakers gave two of the few remaining players in the championship squad (and even more) to Washington for another star. Alex Caruso was also not kept, as a result, Anthony Davis and LeBron James are the only players besides Talen Horton-Tucker to have wore purple-and-gold continuously since winning the 2020 title.

The new supporting cast has yet to be found, several of the players who have been brought in have not yet been able to play or only to a limited extent. But the two superstars are no longer the same players they were in their first season together.

Anthony Davis: The jump shot is gone

Davis is also one of the better defenders in the NBA this season, even if he can’t hide the lack of point-of-attack defense at the Lakers; LA was in 20th place in the Defense category as a team for the season, interestingly enough the Lakers defend even slightly worse in Davis’ minutes.

One possible reason: There are games, or at least phases of games, in which Davis is extremely dominant defensively, but does not do so as consistently as the Lakers would like to see or as they need it to be. Even in the minutes that Davis spends on the five, which the Lakers have always dominated for the past two seasons, they allow loud Cleaning the Glass currently 112.8 points. This is bad.

The offense, however, is worse. Davis remains an absolute monster on the ring (75 percent hit rate!), But he only hits 35.2 percent of his jump shots and a lousy 18.8 percent from the triple line. His throw is particularly important in lineups with Westbrook because he is (just like LeBron or Horton-Tucker) most effective when he has space for his drive.

Anthony Davis: Compare with Tim Duncan not aged well

It’s not entirely shocking, however, that Davis’s throws outside of the zone don’t do very well. If you look at his career, the outlier is not the current season, but the 2020 bubble: In the sealed-off bubble environment, Davis scored outstandingly from the middle distance (49 percent) and from outside (38 percent), he never got anywhere else Closeness to these values.

The shooting numbers of Anthony Davis

Davis is way better this season than he was in the injury-ridden preseason, but he doesn’t seem ready to take on the team-internal torch from LeBron. He has his best performances, but still feels submerged more often than any other superstar in the league and has entire games in which he seems to forget that he can be a mismatch with his body and his skills at any second.

The cheers of some Lakers fans who proclaimed after the bubble that he was better than Tim Duncan in his Prime were already exaggerated back then, now they seem ridiculous. In just under ten years in the NBA, Davis has not yet proven that he can be number one on a really good team. The Lakers might need one for that.

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