PHOENIX — Lakers coach JJ Redick didn’t need a whiteboard, analytics report, or a training-staff briefing to explain what just happened in the desert on Tuesday night. He only needed a mirror.
Redick has been around basketball long enough to know what he has and what he doesn’t have.
He knows he has a good team. He knows he has one of the top three players on the planet, in the prime of his career, in Luka Doncic. He knows he has one of the top three players in NBA history, who is past his prime but can still moonlight as an All-NBA player, in LeBron James. He knows he has an emerging star in Austin Reaves, who will likely be making his first All-Star appearance in February.
Three All-Stars. Two immortals. One problem.
None of it matters if you can’t guard the future of the league.
“The thing with our team again, these young teams that move, we just can’t move,” Redick said after the Phoenix Suns sprinted past the Lakers for 132 points in a 132-108 demolition. “Seems like we are stuck in mud. Zone didn’t work, then we went to a 15 in the second half, one through five switching, that didn’t work. At that point you are out of options.”
Out of options. And apparently, out of speed.
The Suns were a blur. The Lakers were a smudge.
It’s not like the Lakers don’t talk about defense. They talk about it constantly. Redick spoke at length about protecting sides, icing pick-and-rolls, guarding the point of attack, executing details when the margin for error is thin — all the things championship teams do on instinct.
“I don’t know why we were guarding Mark Williams at the three-point line,” Redick admitted. “You don’t do the things we are trying to do to protect the ball on a side, you get exploited.”
Exploited is one word. Cooked is another.
Booker middled them. Brooks contested them. Bouyea hit midrange twos like they were practice shots. The Lakers were willing to live with some of those looks. They shouldn’t have been willing to die by all of them.
“Overall, the execution, when your margin for error is not super high, you need to be very detailed to execute it,” Redick said. “We can string together good defensive possessions. We didn’t do that at all tonight.”
They didn’t do it for 48 minutes. They didn’t do it for eight minutes. They barely did it for 48 seconds.
James summed it up more succinctly than any coach could.
“Their offense was clicking and our defense wasn’t. That’s really what it was,” he said.
LeBron also gave us the only blueprint worth printing.
“It has to be five guys on a string,” he said. “It’s the fastbreak points, second-chance points, and open threes that we do not want to give up.”
And the Lakers gave up all of them.
Marcus Smart, one of the team’s most vocal defensive anchors, made it clear the staff isn’t the issue.
“It’s really nothing the coaching staff can do,” Smart said. “They do a great job putting us in position to win. We have got to figure it out as players. And we will.”
They will figure it out, he promises. We’ll see.
For now, the Lakers are a study in contrasts. A roster that looks like a title contender on paper and in the standings but looks like a treadmill with a broken motor when it has to defend a young team that plays like the game is evolving faster than they are.
LeBron nailed it when he talked about the choice between easy and hard.
“Being comfortable doesn’t win,” he said. “Being comfortable doesn’t win championships.”
The Lakers aren’t comfortable. They’re stiff. And that’s worse.
Until it can defend youth, speed, transition, and the point of attack without looking like a team trying to sprint in Timberlands, it will not win a championship. And the scoreboard will continue to say the same thing it said in Phoenix on Tuesday night:
Not fast enough. Not young enough. Not close enough.
And most damning of all for a franchise built on rings and résumé mythology: