LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Lakers welcomed a young and hungry Portland Trail Blazers, who had a singular, savage purpose: pressure the ball. And against a Lakers team, hobbled and shorthanded, and reduced to a lone facilitator and creator, that pressure ballooned into a plague.
In the brutal economy of an NBA season, everyone must pay their taxes. The night after striking it big, Austin Reaves settled his debt.
The stat line was a beautiful, brutal lie. Reaves: 41 points. A monumental follow-up to his 51-point opus.
But the truth resided in the other number for Reaves and the Lakers. The damning number. 25 turnovers. A cacophony of stolen passes, ripped dribbles, desperate heaves and a 122-108 loss.
The Lakers’ offense, with Luka Dončić inserted, is a well-oiled machine. Without him, it resembled a broken-down car on the freeway, its hood up, smoke pouring out.
“It’s hard to run offense without ball handlers,” head coach JJ Redick said.
The Blazers’ defense was a vise.
Jrue Holiday, a champion and a predator, mucked up the game. He was everywhere, a phantom in the passing lanes, a wall at the rim.
“They swarm,” Reaves said of the Blazers. “They just fly around, play hard.”
This was an understatement. This was suffocation.
For Reaves, the night was a paradox. He scored, yet he struggled. He created for others, but he coughed it up. Eight turnovers bore his name, a testament to the impossible burden of facilitating a broken offense.
On the night, Reaves was the architect, the foreman, and the only laborer on a construction site that was collapsing around him.
“I’m tired,” Reaves admitted postgame. “But you know, this is this is why we play the game… We played hard enough to win. We just didn’t execute good enough.”
The hope—the fleeting momentum from Sacramento—evaporated possession by possession. Each offensive rebound surrendered—19 in total, leading to 35 backbreaking Portland points—was a spiritual gut punch.
When you play, 24 seconds of good defense, and you surrender an offensive rebound, something leaves you. It just demoralizes you. It demoralized the Lakers.
Demoralized. Defeated. Done.
Yet, in the wreckage, there were glimmers. A coach’s belief in his star’s burgeoning voice.
“I see it,” Redick said.
There was the faint hope of returning bodies, of reinforcements. “Hopeful on Jackson (Hayes), hopeful on Marcus (Smart),” Redick said. Their availability is a small prayer ahead of their game on Wednesday against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
But this night was a lesson paid for in frustration and fatigue. A lesson that individual brilliance, no matter how scintillating, can be extinguished when the supporting parts don’t hold up.
The Lakers asked one man to be a river, but on Monday, the well ran dry. The supporting cast, valiant but overmatched, couldn’t squeeze water out of a rock.
In the end, the final box score bore the truth and a chiasmus that reversed the joy of the previous night. Reaves, reflecting on his 41-point effort in a loss versus his 51 in a win, laid it bare.
“That was much more fun because we won,” Reaves said. “So you know it’s not as sweet when you don’t win.”