EL SEGUNDO — The Lakers reconvened at their practice facility Saturday morning, knowing full well their effort and execution over the previous three games had landed well short of their baseline.
Lakers coach JJ Redick said after a 119-96 loss to the visiting Houston Rockets on Christmas Day that the next film session would be “uncomfortable,” but that those words must have arrived in the heat of the moment because the second-year coach chose softer descriptions like “recalibration” and “reconnection” when he appeared before the gathered media following Saturday’s extra-long session.
“For myself, I’m always gonna look in the mirror first,” Redick said. “It’s easy as a player or coach to say, ‘Well, it’s this guy’s fault,’ or ‘We’re not doing this because of X, Y and Z.’ We had a great meeting as a staff this morning, came in super early and met with the players. It was very positive, and it was also listening. For our staff and myself to listen to the players and what they need.”
Whether that will be enough to prevent the Lakers (19-10) from losing their fourth in a row Sunday evening against the visiting Sacramento Kings (7-23) and matching their longest losing streak over the past three seasons is yet to be known, but the two players who spoke after practice Saturday sounded optimistic.
“I play for the Los Angeles Lakers, every day is a good day,” Lakers center Deandre Ayton said. “Every day is a new opportunity to get better, 1% better, so bad day, good day, I don’t know, we don’t have those.”
Rui Hachimura said the film session involved positive input from every member of the team.
“We’re not pointing at each other,” Hachimura said. “We talked about everybody, players, coaches. We’ve just got to tighten up. We had a good stretch at the beginning (of the season) and now we kind of, I don’t know, we relaxed and got tired of winning, but we stopped doing what we were supposed to do”
Moving to the forefront of the Lakers’ concerns is the injury to starting forward Austin Reaves, who will miss approximately four weeks after sustaining a grade 2 left gastrocnemius (upper calf muscle) strain in the loss to the Rockets.
Reaves is second on the team in scoring at 26.6 points a game while also contributing 5.2 rebounds and 6.3 assists per game.
“We just need our guys to be stars in their roles,” Redick said of the game plan without Reaves. “Certainly, from a top-end talent standpoint, it diminishes that, but it doesn’t change the non-negotiables or how we’re trying to play.”
Injuries have also sidelined Luka Doncic for seven of the 29 games this season and LeBron James for 16 games. Losing Reaves for another month will likely further delay the chemistry the Lakers need to be successful.
“Our guys upstairs have told us 250 minutes is like the sort of target number for when lineup data starts to set and normalize,” Redick said. “So, you can look at a lineup (that has played) 11 minutes, ‘Oh, look at this 11 minutes!’ Yeah, we played small-ball for one game and they played well that game. You can’t take a ton from that, but there’s certainly trends that we’re looking at and we’ve kind of made some decisions on where we’re gonna go.”
Redick said since James began his season Nov. 18 after missing training camp and the first 14 games due to sciatica, the Lakers haven’t been as organized offensively and too many of their possessions have ended with random shot selections, but Redick also took responsibility for those lapses.
“I really believe in just getting back to basics and understanding the needs of the team and the needs of each guy for creating more clarity,” he said. “I know I played, and what can seem very simple [in practice and film] is not very simple once you get in real-time live action. It’s not gonna happen in a day, but we gotta get back to building our defensive fundamentals.”
The Lakers will be up against a Sacramento team that’s without three of its top four scorers.
Keegan Murray is the latest to go down after sustaining a calf injury during a 136-127 loss to the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday.
The Kings were already without three-time All-NBA center Domantas Sabonis, who is expected to be sidelined at least four more weeks because of a partially torn meniscus in his left knee.
Zach LaVine, the team’s leading scorer and a two-time All-Star guard, is expected to miss at least another week after suffering a left ankle sprain in a loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Nov. 14.
That leaves a pair of Los Angeles County natives, DeMar DeRozan and Russell Westbrook, as the top two scoring options for Sacramento.
Sacramento at Lakers
When: 6:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Crypto.com Arena
TV/Radio: Spectrum SportsNet+, Spectrum SportsNet/ESPN LA 710