JJ Redick, on multiple occasions this season, has spoken about his belief in being process-oriented. It’s a necessary tool for any athlete, and especially one who earned his NBA fortune as a shooter while missing more threes than he made. If, Redick has said, he knew he was putting in the right kind of work, he could be at peace with the result after the ball left his hand.
He reiterated it before the Lakers played the Clippers on Sunday, and in the aftermath of their lopsided 116-102 loss at the Intuit Dome, he mentioned it again.
“Every time we made a mistake they made us pay. But our guys competed. We fought. We stayed together,” the Lakers coach said after the loss. “This is for us, this was a good process for us. We didn’t get the result we wanted.”
But that message isn’t resonating inside a locker room that had grown frustrated with the Lakers’ inconsistencies, with LeBron James saying the team’s roster construction is the reason for its razor thin margin for error.
Asked if there were ways for the Lakers to increase those margins, internally, James was blunt.
“Nah,” he said. “That’s how our team is constructed. We don’t have room for error — for much error.”
In a follow-up, James was asked if the Lakers had to play near-perfect basketball most nights to win. And again, James basically said the roster flaws demanded it.
“We don’t have a choice,” James said. “I mean… that’s the way our team is constructed. And we have to, we have to play close-to-perfect basketball.”
James’ comments could’ve maybe been written off as frustration after the Lakers lost for the fourth time in their last six games, but Redick also was being realistic about the team’s chances each time it plays. Asked about a stretch of schedule that saw the Lakers in Los Angeles for 10 of 12 games (the Lakers are currently 5-5 during it), it was hard to tell if he was being optimistic or fatalistic.
“You can certainly look at a calendar and say this is an easier part of the schedule or this is a more difficult part. Nothing is going to be easy for our team. And I figured that out very early in the season,” Redick said before shifting tone. “And that’s OK. We’re going to keep fighting. … We have 18 losses, so by the loss column, we’re sixth. We would like to be higher. I think there’s a couple games where we would all say we should have won. We haven’t had any of those games where you’re like, ‘Well, we kind of stole that one.’ We’re going to get a couple back at some point. We just got to continue to trust each other and we’ll be fine.”
The numbers, Redick said, are the numbers. Despite being 22-18, the Lakers have a negative point differential — and not a particularly close one. At minus-2.6 points, only Utah, New Orleans and Portland have been worse.
“We don’t have a huge margin for error. Nor can we create that margin organically,” Redick said. “It has to be emphasized daily to touch the paint, to play paint-to-great mentality, make the extra pass. We don’t have a guy on our team that’s going to necessarily always draw two to the ball. We don’t have a guy on our team that’s going to be able to get past his guy one-on-one and get to the paint and spread it out to the perimeter.
“Like, that’s just not our team. So we have to do it through connectivity, through execution. And when we do that, we’re really good.”
And when the Lakers don’t?
They end up in a mood like they were Sunday night, asking themselves the big questions that have kept them, in the words of one longtime NBA scout who watched the Lakers this week, “stuck.”