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That’s what I was thinking… and of course that roster minus LBJ wouldn’t be winning a lot of games. Not enough on ball playmaking
**LA LAKERS THREAD** Sitting on 17! 2023-2024 offseason begins
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by licensed to ball,
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Otto Porter Jr. would've been perfect. But he was fat and injured the last few years.
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Ya that would have been the common sense player to get
but lebron and pelinka don’t think common sense. They usually like to think outside the box. (See: this year and three years ago with old ball handlers)
he did sign quickly with the dubs so maybe he wanted to go there all along?
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Season starts tonight
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Remember during that terrible 2012-13 season how many times D'Antoni and the players said the season starts tonight?
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Remember last years ADs “this is a must win” proclamationsRemember during that terrible 2012-13 season how many times D'Antoni and the players said the season starts tonight?
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Remember during that terrible 2012-13 season how many times D'Antoni and the players said the season starts tonight?
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just wait for lebron to go into "playoff mode" yall
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Remember during that terrible 2012-13 season how many times D'Antoni and the players said the season starts tonight?
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Great news....
LeBron James could be out much longer than the Lakers are saying. Can they survive without him?
By Bill Oram Nov 7, 2021 47
PORTLAND — LeBron James watched once again from the sideline as Russell Westbrook fired airball after airball, muffed layups and committed casual turnovers. As Anthony Davis was not available to his team. As the remaining Lakers failed to successfully execute even base-level defense.
These have been the hallmarks of the first 10 games of this go-for-broke, championship-or-bust Lakers season and likely will be for as long as James is unable to play due to an abdominal strain.
And how long will that be? How long will Westbrook’s worst traits represent the Lakers’ best hope for winning games? How long before James returns to do, well, everything?
The Lakers have not put an official timeline on James’ injury, although coach Frank Vogel reiterated Saturday that the team believed it would be “at least a week.”
That’s intentionally vague, open-ended and likely misleading, evoking memories of the lack of clarity around the groin strain that knocked James out for 17 straight games in 2018-19.
The most insight into James’ injury so far came in the form of an Instagram post from the Lakers’ former head strength and conditioning coach, Tim DiFrancesco. Now the owner of TD Athlete’s Edge, a training and rehab operation near Boston, DiFrancesco explained in a post Saturday morning that the injury is one that can occur with the overextension of the torso combined with extreme force — such as a powerful serve in tennis or a tomahawk dunk in basketball.
Recovery time? Four to eight weeks for even a minor strain, according to DiFrancesco.
In a follow-up conversation with The Athletic, DiFrancesco stressed that the severity of the injury would determine the timeline, and while that is unknown, he said the most minor strain could still take two to six weeks.
“Especially the way he plays, it’s tough for me to see him getting back under four weeks,” said DiFrancesco, who worked for the Lakers from 2011-17. “Then again, he’s a different dude, so I wouldn’t put anything past him. … These are such delicate injuries that can respond to rest with pain relief quickly, but they are highly susceptible to re-injury if returned too quickly.”
Last week, Vogel described James’ injury as “hopefully … something that’s minimal.”
But if James misses a month or more, there will be nothing minimal about the impact of his absence. It will be the third-most-serious injury of his career, with the other two coming in the past three seasons. His groin strain in 2018-19 knocked the Lakers out of playoff position, marking the first time since James’ rookie season that he failed to reach the playoffs, and the high ankle sprain he suffered last season cost him 20 games and led to the Lakers losing in the first round of the playoffs — the first time that had happened in James’ 18 seasons in the NBA.
The one season James has not suffered a significant injury with the Lakers included a four-month break at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic — essentially a standard offseason — before the league resumed play in the bubble.
How much does the outlook of this season change if James is out until December? Until January?
Can this team compete without its center of gravity?
“He’s a big key to our team, but we’ve still got to play,” Davis said this week. “Don’t know how long he’s going to be out, but still have to find ways to win basketball games. We can’t control him playing or not playing. What we can control is going out and winning basketball games with the guys that we have. And we have enough pieces to still win basketball games, even though he plays a huge part to both ends of the floor to what we do.”
In four games without James this season, however, the Lakers are 1-3. And the solution to his absence has not been to lean more heavily on Westbrook. The erstwhile MVP committed a series of head-scratching errors in the final minute of Thursday’s unraveling against Oklahoma City, and he was even worse Saturday in Portland. He shot just 1 of 13 from the field and committed six turnovers. He also air-balled a 16-footer, air-balled a pull-up jumper and failed to hit the rim on a driving layup. At one point, he muffed two shots at the rim on a single possession, eventually committing a turnover before he could miss a third.
“He’s shown flashes of being great for us,” Vogel said. “We all didn’t have a good night. The whole team didn’t have a good night. We’ve got to find ways as a coaching staff to help him and put him in a position to succeed. It’s on all of us to make sure that happens, to make sure he gets comfortable and feels good about the environment around him.”
Westbrook’s struggles are not without precedent. The Lakers are his fourth team in four seasons, and he began slowly in each of his starts in Houston and Washington.
“I’m just trying to figure it out, you know?” Westbrook said. “It’s what I do. It’s what I do, it’s what I’ve done the last four or five years.”
James’ injury has come at a time the Lakers are still adrift in their quest to establish an identity. He and Westbrook have only had six regular-season games to work on their awkward — some say bad — fit, and that process is now indefinitely delayed. The Lakers have managed to go just .500 through an opening stretch of their season that was seen as highly favorable. And though they play their next five games at home over eight days, after that they embark on a five-game Eastern Conference road trip that will include a matchup with the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks.
If DiFrancesco’s assessment of James’ injury is on point, it is easy to imagine the Lakers continuing to lose throughout that stretch.
Their defense has been horrific, and on Saturday night Vogel painted a bleak picture of what schemes he can even attempt to deploy with his ramshackle personnel.
“We pulled back on our double teams, because we weren’t executing them well enough like we have been the last few games,” he said. “So we fell back into some of our base coverages, and (Damian Lillard’s) been cold; Dame got hot. That’s the biggest thing that stands out. And obviously you try to make more of a run, you try to junk the game up, play a little more zone. And we weren’t very good at the zone during that stretch either.”
By the time James returns, the Lakers could be in such a hole that it will be hard to embrace the philosophy of building gradually over the season that has been such a mantra of this team. James may have to go into playoff mode months ahead of schedule just to get the Lakers to a favorable position in the West. That’s to say nothing of the fact that for as long as James is out, the Lakers will be relying on a collection of aging veterans, including the 32-year-old Westbrook and the 37-year-old Carmelo Anthony.
As a bonus: It has been three years since anyone completed an 82-game regular season, and most of these guys were old then.
The best the Lakers can hope for is that Davis remains healthy, Westbrook continues to acclimate and when James returns – ideally on the optimistic end of those timelines — they haven’t fallen hopelessly behind the field in the West.
By Bill Oram Nov 7, 2021 47
PORTLAND — LeBron James watched once again from the sideline as Russell Westbrook fired airball after airball, muffed layups and committed casual turnovers. As Anthony Davis was not available to his team. As the remaining Lakers failed to successfully execute even base-level defense.
These have been the hallmarks of the first 10 games of this go-for-broke, championship-or-bust Lakers season and likely will be for as long as James is unable to play due to an abdominal strain.
And how long will that be? How long will Westbrook’s worst traits represent the Lakers’ best hope for winning games? How long before James returns to do, well, everything?
The Lakers have not put an official timeline on James’ injury, although coach Frank Vogel reiterated Saturday that the team believed it would be “at least a week.”
That’s intentionally vague, open-ended and likely misleading, evoking memories of the lack of clarity around the groin strain that knocked James out for 17 straight games in 2018-19.
The most insight into James’ injury so far came in the form of an Instagram post from the Lakers’ former head strength and conditioning coach, Tim DiFrancesco. Now the owner of TD Athlete’s Edge, a training and rehab operation near Boston, DiFrancesco explained in a post Saturday morning that the injury is one that can occur with the overextension of the torso combined with extreme force — such as a powerful serve in tennis or a tomahawk dunk in basketball.
Recovery time? Four to eight weeks for even a minor strain, according to DiFrancesco.
In a follow-up conversation with The Athletic, DiFrancesco stressed that the severity of the injury would determine the timeline, and while that is unknown, he said the most minor strain could still take two to six weeks.
“Especially the way he plays, it’s tough for me to see him getting back under four weeks,” said DiFrancesco, who worked for the Lakers from 2011-17. “Then again, he’s a different dude, so I wouldn’t put anything past him. … These are such delicate injuries that can respond to rest with pain relief quickly, but they are highly susceptible to re-injury if returned too quickly.”
Last week, Vogel described James’ injury as “hopefully … something that’s minimal.”
But if James misses a month or more, there will be nothing minimal about the impact of his absence. It will be the third-most-serious injury of his career, with the other two coming in the past three seasons. His groin strain in 2018-19 knocked the Lakers out of playoff position, marking the first time since James’ rookie season that he failed to reach the playoffs, and the high ankle sprain he suffered last season cost him 20 games and led to the Lakers losing in the first round of the playoffs — the first time that had happened in James’ 18 seasons in the NBA.
The one season James has not suffered a significant injury with the Lakers included a four-month break at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic — essentially a standard offseason — before the league resumed play in the bubble.
How much does the outlook of this season change if James is out until December? Until January?
Can this team compete without its center of gravity?
“He’s a big key to our team, but we’ve still got to play,” Davis said this week. “Don’t know how long he’s going to be out, but still have to find ways to win basketball games. We can’t control him playing or not playing. What we can control is going out and winning basketball games with the guys that we have. And we have enough pieces to still win basketball games, even though he plays a huge part to both ends of the floor to what we do.”
In four games without James this season, however, the Lakers are 1-3. And the solution to his absence has not been to lean more heavily on Westbrook. The erstwhile MVP committed a series of head-scratching errors in the final minute of Thursday’s unraveling against Oklahoma City, and he was even worse Saturday in Portland. He shot just 1 of 13 from the field and committed six turnovers. He also air-balled a 16-footer, air-balled a pull-up jumper and failed to hit the rim on a driving layup. At one point, he muffed two shots at the rim on a single possession, eventually committing a turnover before he could miss a third.
“He’s shown flashes of being great for us,” Vogel said. “We all didn’t have a good night. The whole team didn’t have a good night. We’ve got to find ways as a coaching staff to help him and put him in a position to succeed. It’s on all of us to make sure that happens, to make sure he gets comfortable and feels good about the environment around him.”
Westbrook’s struggles are not without precedent. The Lakers are his fourth team in four seasons, and he began slowly in each of his starts in Houston and Washington.
“I’m just trying to figure it out, you know?” Westbrook said. “It’s what I do. It’s what I do, it’s what I’ve done the last four or five years.”
James’ injury has come at a time the Lakers are still adrift in their quest to establish an identity. He and Westbrook have only had six regular-season games to work on their awkward — some say bad — fit, and that process is now indefinitely delayed. The Lakers have managed to go just .500 through an opening stretch of their season that was seen as highly favorable. And though they play their next five games at home over eight days, after that they embark on a five-game Eastern Conference road trip that will include a matchup with the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks.
If DiFrancesco’s assessment of James’ injury is on point, it is easy to imagine the Lakers continuing to lose throughout that stretch.
Their defense has been horrific, and on Saturday night Vogel painted a bleak picture of what schemes he can even attempt to deploy with his ramshackle personnel.
“We pulled back on our double teams, because we weren’t executing them well enough like we have been the last few games,” he said. “So we fell back into some of our base coverages, and (Damian Lillard’s) been cold; Dame got hot. That’s the biggest thing that stands out. And obviously you try to make more of a run, you try to junk the game up, play a little more zone. And we weren’t very good at the zone during that stretch either.”
By the time James returns, the Lakers could be in such a hole that it will be hard to embrace the philosophy of building gradually over the season that has been such a mantra of this team. James may have to go into playoff mode months ahead of schedule just to get the Lakers to a favorable position in the West. That’s to say nothing of the fact that for as long as James is out, the Lakers will be relying on a collection of aging veterans, including the 32-year-old Westbrook and the 37-year-old Carmelo Anthony.
As a bonus: It has been three years since anyone completed an 82-game regular season, and most of these guys were old then.
The best the Lakers can hope for is that Davis remains healthy, Westbrook continues to acclimate and when James returns – ideally on the optimistic end of those timelines — they haven’t fallen hopelessly behind the field in the West.
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That’s like the Lakers saying “AD has a viral stomach bug, will be out for 1 week”
then a doctor writing an article saying “it could be HIV, he could die. I’m not saying it is. I haven’t spoke to player or his doctor. But viral stomach bugs can be a simple virus that will pass or rarely HIV. Next on Undisputed”
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Wes Matthews not walking through that door
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Reminder that the clippers have a top 5 defense and they have Kennard, Reggie Jackson, Zubac heavy in their rotation. The former 2 wouldn’t be able to play in vogels system bc they wouldn’t be good enough defensively.
monk on the clippers would be prime Lou Will. Maybe it’s the pressure
monk on the clippers would be prime Lou Will. Maybe it’s the pressure
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This ******* guy lol
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Nothing says “inner city love” like charging 50 dollars for a t shirt that costs 30 cents to make.
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League is ******
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