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Lakers’ defense failing miserably puts Vogel in impossible position

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A team of bad defenders playing bad defense should surprise nobody

Now, we must acknowledge that things are going to get better, if only because they can’t get worse. The Lakers have been without LeBron for 40 percent of their five games. That hurts defensively. Trevor Ariza and Talen Horton-Tucker are probably the third- and fourth-best defenders on this roster. Neither has played a game yet. Continuity is critical to defense. The Lakers don’t have it yet. They’re going to develop it with time. Assuming you ignore seasons in which he requested a trade, no Anthony Davis defense has finished even below average since the 2015-16 season. The high-end talent and coaching here is going to matter.

But they’re not going to solve everything, and responsibility for that falls squarely on a front office that put Vogel in this impossible position in the first place. After watching him keep the defense afloat without James and Davis last season, they seemingly built a roster this offseason under the assumption that Vogel could generate stops no matter what players he was given. That doesn’t mean Vogel isn’t blameless here. His rotations can be somewhat baffling, and to some extent, a coach is responsible for the effort of his players, but the flawed roster-building process the Lakers engaged in this offseason runs far deeper. The Lakers traded their defense for a third star without a plan to replace it.

This isn’t, in itself, an indictment of the Russell Westbrook acquisition, but rather, an indictment of everything that came after it. The Lakers, as an organization, do not seem to have fully understood the gravity of the decision that they made in adding Westbrook. As Houston learned when it literally had to abandon the center position entirely in order to make his fit work, it takes a nearly perfectly-constructed roster to maximize him. He is simultaneously one of the NBA’s most uniquely gifted and flawed players. Taking advantage of the positives means going above and beyond to cover up the negatives. It means finding supporting players that don’t compromise spacing or defense. It means complete and total organizational buy-in both financially and ideologically, the sort of attention to detail that separates good franchises from great ones.

The Lakers didn’t have that this summer. Golden State and Brooklyn are both spending in excess of $50 million in pre-tax salary on players outside of their three-highest paid cornerstones. The Lakers, with access to all of the financial benefits of being the NBA’s most glamorous and accomplished franchise, are spending a more modest $36 million (excluding dead money) on their supporting cast, according to Spotrac. They chose Talen Horton-Tucker, an unproven prospect whose poor shooting makes it unlikely that he’ll ever fit properly alongside Westbrook, over Alex Caruso, a top-flight point-of-attack defender with an excellent track record alongside James and Davis. They theoretically could have retained both had they been willing to pay a higher tax bill. Doing so probably should have been a priority after losing key defenders Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kyle Kuzma in the Westbrook deal. They used their mid-level exception (Kendrick Nunn) and several minimum slots (Monk, Anthony) on redundant scorers. In the process, they ignored more practical three-and-D role players, including James Ennis and Wesley Matthews, both of whom publicly lobbied for spots on the team. Of the 15 players on the roster, 10 are making the minimum salary. It goes without saying that players who take the minimum tend to be available at that price for a reason. The defect that gave the Lakers access to several of those players was poor defense.

None of this precludes the Lakers from winning a championship, and while there is no basketball justification for some of their financially-driven decisions, the talent-over-fit approach the front office took this offseason comes with as much upside as it does risk. Things are going to get better. The Lakers are going to wind up winning a lot of games based on that talent alone. There are going to be opportunities to turn the salaries of Horton-Tucker and Nunn into easier fits at the trade deadline if the Lakers want to pursue them.

But they built a roster that wasn’t designed to defend particularly well. It should therefore surprise nobody that, through five games, that roster isn’t defending very well. The Lakers replaced most of their defenders with veterans who are either past their prime on that end of the floor or never had primes in the first place. No coach could overcome that. Not even Vogel.

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