How the ■■■■ do you lose at home when your opponent shoots 7-47 from 3???
Well done to the Wolves.
They did well this series. I certainly wasn’t expecting Antman to step up like that.
When he was on the court, he didn’t fall into the trap of playing hero ball. He got the others involved and upped his assists. I thought we sent the double to Ant too often. It made it easy for them to pick us apart.
Julius Randle was able to get to the basket.
They also knew that if they ever needed to match our ‘medium sized’ lineup, they could bring in Naz and DeVicenzo and we’d struggle against that.
The only times we were able to stay close to the Wolves was when Gobert was there knowing we’d lose the offensive boards. So when that worked for the Wolves, they didn’t need to go to their Naz and DeVicenzo lineup.
We didn’t have any depth. And that was always the toughest thing to get through in the playoffs. Only 4 points off the bench today. That’s just not good enough.
We had no easy ‘lob threat’ scorers which made things even more difficult offensively.
Defensively we were going to find it tough to hold teams down.
I thought Reaves was poor this series. I don’t think it’s trade him away and get him off the roster poor, I just think he’ll have to improve off that. Rui had a good game today but was okay at best the whole series.
Luka and Lebron did what they could.
I don’t mind Vanderbilt, but offensively, he was tough to work with. He’s solely a defender.
Onto next season, we obviously need to sort out the centre position. We do need ‘3 and D’ wings, but so does every bloody team in the league need. So we’ll have to overpay for that.
Lebron will opt out and then back in.
Finney-Smith has a player option. I’m not sure if he takes that or looks to play elsewhere. He’s the ‘3 and D’ wing that most other teams will try and get him.
Jaxon is a free agent, so he’s likely to go. Same with Markieff Morris and Alex Len. But that’s $5.5 mil off the books.
Players in their last year of contract are Rui, Kleber and Gabe Vincent. So there isn’t much trade value there.
Hopefully, we don’t go star hunting. No Giannis, Durant or anyone like that. Just work on getting dependable bench players and a centre. It’ll be tough to get trades done without adding Reaves, Rui or Knecht into the trade.
We need to get on the training court and get repetition into Luka, Lebron and whoever else is in our roster. Hopefully Knecht improves defensively and can be our main scorer off the bench.
Because you have 2 turnstiles on defence in your starting 5 and a podcaster as Head Coach.
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Lakers losing makes me feel a whole lot better about our impending choke job
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Luka doesn’t take his fitness or the game seriously, Lakers aren’t gonna win with him. The biggest sook.
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Reaves is an ok player but the fit with Doncic is terrible and realistically that’s who you’re building around now. He will be traded. You need a big who can roll to the basket or the three point line and 5-6 3 and D guys.
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I think we rate Reaves internally so high, that we’d only trade him if a star come back.
His contract is low, it’ll be a Rui and Reaves trade. But that only gets you to $32mil. We’ll try and find trades for Vincent, Kleber, Vanderbilt and Milton. It’s going to be tough to trade any of them through the pre-season. They are more likely in-season trades.
I’d say the first step would be that Lebron takes a pay cut and we use that on a free agent like we were hoping last year. But I doubt we get someone for the MLE, but I doubt he takes that much of a pay cut and I doubt we secure someone in time before the deadline when we have to sign Lebron.
OKC rated Giddey high and he’s clearly a good player, but he was a woeful fit next to SGA. Now they are on track for a run at multiple championships.
You have to build around Luka and that will mean getting rid of AR. Maybe management will try and make it work before they hit the button but it will be futile.
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I think Giddey was a different situation.
Yes, they rated him, but he was never the third best player in their starting lineup. And Giddey’s glaring big issue was not being able to hit open 3s. Especially in playoffs.
AR’s defence has improved this year. He had plenty of wide open 3s in this playoff series and didn’t make them.
We’ll hang on to him and the odds are, it be futile. Because we aren’t 1 player away from a championship. The centre will be the easier trade to do without needing to give up Reaves. We’ll save the Reaves trade for the 3 and D wings that will be very difficult to get. We gave up a fair bit Finney-Smith.
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AR isn’t the issue, LeBron is. He averaged 27.9 points, 8.3 assists and 6.6 rebounds in 9 games without LeBron on 49/92/90 splits. Keeping a 40 year old who is only out there for himself and plays zero defence will show that the Lakers aren’t serious about winning.
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They were a 3 seed so it did work for a while.
Apart from the PR aspect, there’s not a lot of sense in keeping James around any longer.
He takes a fair chunk of their salary cap and has never shown the capacity to be a team player over an extended period.
If The Lakers are serious about moving towards their next championship, they need to let James loose…or ask him to give up a large chunk of his salary to enable them to chase better players.
I doubt that either of those options will eventuate.
James will put his hand out and The Lakers will roll over and pay him.
And another year will be wasted.
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Exactly. He’s not a winning basketball player anymore. It’s all empty numbers he puts up. He had a negative +/- all season and in the playoffs the Lakers were outscored by 34 points with him on the court across those 5 games. This is a 3-seed that had a 50 win season, yet the Lakers were outscored with LeBron on the floor. How does that happen? It’s not like he’s on a lottery team…
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$52M next year… he ain’t going anywhere
You might be right, I don’t watch the Lakers super closely. I do think you need great defenders around Luka though
He’s still getting all NBA votes from people like Bill Simmons who would go out of his way to slander the Lakers.
Luke needs a similar roster construction to what Houston had with Harden in their more successful years.
The irony of AD being involved in the trade is that he’d be one of the best matches in the league for Luka.
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Maybe they could orchestrate a trade…LBJ for AD 
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Luka with Kyrie made an NBA Finals. Luka with LeBron, out in the first round. Says plenty.
