The Los Angeles Lakers weren’t just bad in first quarters early in the season, they were historically awful. In their first eight games, they were outscored by 74 total points in first quarters. That was an NBA record.
In Game No. 9, head coach Darvin Ham made a change that has thus far stuck and yielded slightly better results. Austin Reaves went to the bench, Cam Reddish joined the starting lineup, and the Lakers have somewhat stabilized ever since. They are 12-8 since they made the switch, but the cracks are starting to show. They have been outscored by 30 points in first quarters since making that change, and on Wednesday, the Chicago Bulls outscored them by 11 in the opening frame.
On the right night, the Lakers can overcome these early deficits. Lately, they haven’t. The Lakers are now 1-4 since they won the inaugural In-Season Tournament. They’ve lost three in a row and have three of the hardest games on their schedule coming in the next few days: a road game in Minnesota on Thursday, another road trip to Oklahoma City on Saturday, and, finally, a home game against the Celtics on Christmas Day. That’s the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in the West followed by the No. 1 seed in the East. Getting out to quick starts in those games will be imperative, but when he was asked about making another lineup change to potentially make that happen, Ham pushed back.
“You can’t just keep, on a whim, changing,” Ham said. “That’s a big deal when you change your starting lineup at this level.” Ham might be right, but the group he’s putting out there just hasn’t worked lately. While LeBron James and Anthony Davis are still more than doing their part, the three remaining starters haven’t held up their end of the bargain.
D’Angelo Russell, relied upon as the only other ball-handler in the lineup, is averaging just 8.7 points and 5.1 assists per game in December on 37.7% shooting from the field and 26.5% from 3-point range. The pairing of Cam Reddish and Taurean Prince hasn’t yielded much better. They’re combining to make just 73 of their 214 3-pointers on the season for an average of roughly 34%.
The result has been a starting lineup devoid of spacing that is putting up a paltry 109.8 points per 100 possessions. This group simply can’t score, and with Reddish taking a step back defensively since his hot start to the season, it hasn’t defended opposing perimeter players nearly as well as it did a month ago either.
There’s a pretty simple and largely proven fix at Ham’s disposal if he wants it. The Lakers had a dominant starting five at the end of last season. The group of Russell, James, Davis, Austin Reaves and Jarred Vanderbilt outscored regular-season opponents by 20.6 points per 100 possessions in the season’s final stretch. Its effectiveness varied by matchup in the playoffs, but makes plenty of logical sense together. James, Davis and Reaves are largely reliable two-way players. Russell lifts the group offensively while Vanderbilt does so defensively.
While Vanderbilt missed most of the early season, he’s back now. Still, though, he’s playing at less than 100% and hasn’t reached even 17 minutes in a game yet. His slot as the lineup’s designated defender would likely need to be supplemented by Reddish or another reserve for meaningful minutes. Yet on the whole, Ham has used last year’s starting lineups for a whopping three possessions this year. Even if he’s not going to start the unit, it’s a group that needs to see some playing time together. It’s the only proven group this team has.
Reaves has thrived in a bench role, but he could still run some second-unit lineups if Ham decided to stagger him with James. Of course, considering how well virtually every lineup featuring the two of them tends to play, it might make more sense to pair James and Reaves as the anchors of one bench unit and trust Russell and Davis to lead the other. If nothing else, moving Reaves back into the starting lineup might give the Lakers the firepower they need to avoid these early deficits.
Ham tends to be careful when it comes to rocking the boat from a locker room perspective. He let Russell Westbrook start the first three games of last season when the entire basketball world knew he wasn’t a fit with James. Players don’t like having their roles changed frequently. There are risks associated with major shakeups. But right now, what the Lakers are doing isn’t working. Some sort of change is needed. The simplest would be to go back to what has already worked in the past.
