The Lakers continue to struggle after a loss in Orlando, how can they bounce back? Es Baraheni and Isaac Gutierrez of the Deep 3 Podcast discuss which trends are real, and which are just a product of March in the NBA. Then, the Athletic’s Hunter Patterson joins to discuss the Detroit Pistons and who they’d want to play in the first round + what has led to the turnaround for Detroit.Host: Es BaraheniWith: Isaac Gutierrez and Hunter PattersonExecutive Producer: Andrew SchlechtAudio Producer: Grayson Moodyhttps://www.nytimes.com/athletic/nba/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chapter 1: What are the Lakers' struggles after recent losses?
Right, yeah, that's part of how they want to play. Look, I want to ask you about something that we kind of talked about off air when we were texting about this game, the Lakers offense in general, because it feels like they're being led by LeBron and Rui, well, not Rui tonight, but Austin Reeves and obviously Luka Doncic, that three-headed monster. They balled out today for the most part.
They did their thing, but the rest of the team, Was lacking. They weren't able to finish their shots, et cetera, et cetera. Just the shot making wasn't there for the Lakers overall tonight. Is that a concern for you? Is that, you know, if we're going back to the March basketball thing, is that just a March basketball thing or is this really an issue for the Lakers moving forward?
No, it's really an issue. I think since the Lakers traded for Luka Doncic, people have had this idea in their mind of what the team would be, right? Luka, LeBron, Reeves. Wow. Offensively, you have these genius ball handlers. They can all play on ball, all play off ball. It will be electric. No defensive talent.
All three of those players I mentioned that lead the ship, bad defenders, yada, yada, yada. In the games that they've won in the stretch before LeBron got hurt especially, they were number one in defensive rating. Obviously, inversely people expected. And over the last 15 games, they're 19th in offensive rating.
They haven't really had a single portion of that run where they're truly an elite offense like people assume they have been. I think there's a big difference in what people think they're watching versus what's actually happening. They just don't have any offensive threats from their big man position. You know, shout out Trey Jamison. He gave us some good minutes throughout that time.
Not an offensive threat. Shout out Jared Vanderbilt. Done it a lot for their defensive effort. Negative offensive threat. Christian Coloco, same thing. They just don't have any type of lob threat, any type of dunker spot threat. As good as Jackson Hayes has been playing, he's not a super big threat there to do anything other than catch open dunks.
It's really hard to have a good offense without those release valves, no matter how good your big ball handlers are. Luka doesn't look quite the same. A big part of it is he has no good screen setters. He's really having to do a lot more isolation than he likes to. if you're looking for a fatal flaw, I think that's it more than defense.
Yeah, no, fair enough. And look, this is, this is going to be really interesting over the next couple of weeks for the Lakers, because this is sort of the trial run with LeBron and Luca and everybody to see how they can play and compete. And they're in the middle of a, of a playoff race for that second seed in the West, which makes this all the more important. Um,
Want to talk, I'll just mention this very quickly, but the Bulls beat the Nuggets without Nikola Jokic. And we talked about the Bulls yesterday on the podcast, talking about how fun they are. And look, they've won eight of their last 10 games. Kobe White has had three straight games of 35 plus points. Josh Giddey over the last month is averaging basically like 21, nine and seven.
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Chapter 2: Is the Suns' winning streak for real?
That's a great point. That's a tough one. Devin Booker, he's one of those guys who is like, there's certain guys who are so talented, it would be hard to pass up on. But again, I think trading the way he's really calculated, even if that were on the table, I assume he would heavily consider just the youth and talent.
the continuity of this team so yeah um keeping them together and not really bringing in bringing anyone in who could stunt the growth of an assar thompson or ron holland maybe right yeah and look there there's a lot of ways to go about internally for this team you know you mentioned assar and ron those guys pop off and become all-star level players the trajectory the ceiling of this team completely changes
But the Pistons are very, very fun this year, regardless of the outcome. I can't wait to watch them in the playoffs. It's going to be awesome. Go read Hunter Patterson, as always. Great work over at The Athletic covering the Pistons. Thank you to Hunter. Thank you to Isaac Gutierrez, who came on a little bit earlier. Appreciate you guys listening to The Athletic NBA Daily. See you guys next time.
Peace out.
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