{"id":15724,"date":"2025-05-07T10:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T10:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/15724\/"},"modified":"2025-05-07T10:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T10:14:07","slug":"lakers-need-rebounding-help-in-the-frontcourt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/15724\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakers need rebounding help in the frontcourt"},"content":{"rendered":"

No rebounds, no rings. That was the one-liner Pat Riley would give to the Los Angeles Lakers<\/a> of the 1980s when he was their head coach. They were never a monstrous rebounding team, but with Riley emphasizing rebounding, they won five NBA championships during that decade and four during his head coaching tenure.<\/p>\n

Today’s Lakers appear to have a championship-caliber core, but their roster is incomplete. In particular, they lack size and beef up front, and the Minnesota Timberwolves<\/a> exposed that deficiency in the first round of this year’s NBA playoffs.<\/p>\n

Minnesota defeated the Lakers in five games while badly outrebounding them throughout the series. Game 5, which they lost by a final score of 103-96<\/a>, was perhaps the most egregious example of the Lakers losing the battle of the boards. In that contest, they were outrebounded 54-37 and gave up 18 offensive rebounds and 20 second-chance points. Rudy Gobert, who averaged 12.0 points and 10.9 rebounds a game during the regular season, looked like a future Hall of Famer with 27 points and 24 rebounds.<\/p>\n

Forward Rui Hachimura stated the obvious afterward \u2014 that Los Angeles needs frontcourt players capable of boxing out and grabbing rebounds at a high level.<\/p>\n

Via Silver Screen and Roll<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need somebody to get rebounds,\u201d Hachimura said. \u201cI got to be one of them, of course. I can\u2019t just be face-to-face boxing out Gobert the whole game. I can\u2019t get a rebound. That\u2019s the whole thing. He\u2019s 7\u20192\u201d [with a] 7\u20195\u201d wingspan, whatever. He\u2019s a big man.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem was, I think because we tried to help on Gobert, put two guys on him and the other guys were diving into offensive rebounds and it\u2019s easy\u2026So I think that was the game for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hachimura played very well offensively in the last two games of the series with a combined 46 points on 18-of-32 field-goal shooting in those contests, but rebounding has never been his strong suit. L.A. badly needs a starting-caliber center who makes rebounding and defense his top priorities, but if it lands such a player, its chances of winning the NBA championship should dramatically rise once next season starts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No rebounds, no rings. That was the one-liner Pat Riley would give to the Los Angeles Lakers of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3790],"tags":[299,7,940,4034,1698,300,4044,298,251,150,4033,4043,307,152,70,85,6,62,67,61,81,939,1012,66,83,308],"class_list":{"0":"post-15724","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-lakers","8":"tag-angeles","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-hachimura","11":"tag-la","12":"tag-la-lakers","13":"tag-lakers","14":"tag-lalakers","15":"tag-los","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","18":"tag-losangeles","19":"tag-losangeleslakers","20":"tag-minnesota","21":"tag-minnesota-timberwolves","22":"tag-national","23":"tag-national-sports","24":"tag-nba","25":"tag-neutral","26":"tag-news","27":"tag-overall","28":"tag-overall-neutral","29":"tag-rui","30":"tag-rui-hachimura","31":"tag-sports","32":"tag-sports-news","33":"tag-timberwolves"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114466027286641315","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}