Brace yourselves, for the Lakers are engulfed in another slump. On the heels of a wholly impressive stretch coming out of the All-Star break in which the two-time defending champions went 17-1, they have hit a snag, dropping their last five contests — one of the recent blunders was Friday’s loss at the hands of the Portland Trail Blazers, who won with unexpected ease, 93-86.
This is, at minimum, the third time the Lakers have found themselves in a losing streak that’s troubling to some, impertinent to others during the season. Invariably, these spates of difficulty spark an unnavigable divide between those who consider any discernible losing streak as the ultimate apocalypse and those who could care less; after all, the playoffs haven’t started yet.
No matter one’s bent on the gravity of the Lakers’ regular-season losses, a trend has emerged this season through which one explanation is sufficient to pinpoint why they were defeated in any instance: they didn’t try hard enough.
No game demonstrated this trend better than Friday’s drubbing by the Blazers. As Phil Jackson said after the game, “These guys just don’t want to play hard right now.â€
(And comments like those are not a one-time thing, for those who view this as an aberration. Looking back to the Lakers’ loss to the Miami Heat on Christmas Day, here’s what Kobe Bryant notoriously had to say postgame: “It’s like these games mean more to our opponents than they do to us,†Bryant said. “I think we need to get that straight — play with more focus, put more [emphasis] on these games. I don’t like it. … We know what we’re capable of doing, and that’s part of the problem.â€)
In this Blazers game, how much did lack of effort really play in to the defeat? The knee-jerk response is obvious: the Lakers are agreeably better than the Trail Blazers, so they had to have phoned in the game to have lost. Yes, the Lakers shot a despicable 39.5 percent, but couldn’t that just have been the result of great Blazers defense?
Bryant shot just 10-of-25 from the field, due in large part to lockdown D from Wesley Matthews, who has emerged as one of the top Kobe stoppers this season. Factor in LaMarcus Aldridge’s containment of Pau Gasol, and it doesn’t seem all that ridiculous that the Lakers could have scored only 86 points.
Meanwhile, the Lakers won the battle of rebounding, a stat that many classify as an effort number, 52-41.
On Wednesday, the Lakers lost to the Golden State Warriors, 95-87, for the first time in 14 matchups. It was largely a poor showing for L.A., but Pau Gasol (18 points on 7-of-11 shooting) and Andrew Bynum (13 points on 5-of-5 shooting, 17 rebounds) were a pair of bright spots. If the problem was effort, care to explain why Pau Gasol only played 27 minutes throughout the game and not at all down the stretch? Presumably Jackson would want the guy in who was actually playing well. Furthermore, Bynum probably would have taken more than five shots if he were playing so effectively and no one else gave a hoot.
It appears, then, that the “effort†argument doesn’t really have much practical traction. More simply, the explanation is probably just that the Lakers get outplayed on occasion. It’s not a huge surprise that the Lakers and their fans would want to remain blind to that argument, though. Considering they have won the last two NBA titles, maybe that’s their prerogative.
Still, there is a disconcerting problem with the duality that the NBA community at large perceives of Lakers’ losses as lack of effort and losses of every other team as nonperformance — more simply, other teams “suck†when they lose. Such was the case Thursday when the Celtics fell to the Bulls in a fairly embarrassing manner. But it wouldn’t be right to say that the Celtics were disinterested in playing hard against the Bulls (after all, they soiled the proverbial bed and were undoubtedly outplayed). So why is it permissible to excuse the Lakers’ poor play that way?
Well, frankly, the Lakers have won a lot over the years. A lot. They have won so much that there’s a culture of win-or-die subordinate only to the delusion that the Yankees and their fans share. With that culture as a basis, the Lakers have done a masterful job of crafting a narrative in which their team bows down to no mortal — in the eyes of the Lakers, they are never underdogs and should never lose.
Consequently, accentuating the accomplishments of another team has a stigma of inner weakness attached to it. Acknowledging that the Blazers’ defense might have shut them down would have been tantamount to saying that the O’Brien Trophy was open for the taking, at least from their perspective. This is why you’ll never, ever see a Lakers player help up an opponent during the game or cry in the locker room after the final buzzer. They vigorously defend their image of toughness.
Phil Jackson didn’t win 11 titles by being an idiot, and it’s evident from his aforementioned comment that he’s aware perception is reality. He’s basically the only coach that will say anything legitimate to the media, and he uses that candidness to, well, construct an effective facade: the Lakers do try, and the appearance of apathy is just a cover for ineluctable vulnerability.
It might sound bunk, but there’s a psychological hurdle to beating the Lakers that is absent for other teams, most notably the Heat. And so long as the Lakers keep winning when it counts, it will remain impenetrable. That might not be right for the game, but it is most definitely right for the Purple and Gold.
