The Lakers’ defense, or lack thereof, has been a topic of conversation all season long. The narrative of Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves as poor defenders portrays the team as incapable of stopping anyone from scoring.
However, perception isn’t always reality.
In the postseason, the purple and gold has been a respectable defensive team with a defensive rating of 109.4, right at the median for playoff teams.
In Game 5, they held the Rockets under 100 points, a benchmark the winning team has reached every
game this series. But it wasn’t enough as the Rockets won and extended this first-round matchup to at least six games.
After the defeat, Lakers head coach JJ Redick said the defense did its job and should’ve been enough to secure the result.
“You got to give [the Rockets] a lot of credit,” Redick said. “They made shots tonight, including some guys who normally don’t make threes. I think our defense, you hope 99 [points for Houston] is enough to win. We just couldn’t make shots. We missed some layups. Certainly had some good looks from 3 that didn’t go down.”
The Rockets shot 14-40 from 3-point range, a below-average performance. Los Angeles also outscored Houston in the paint 44-36. Add in the Lakers winning the rebounding battle 41-34 and Houston only grabbing six offensive boards and the stats certainly signal that a win was on the table for the Lakers.
It’s not just Redick stressing that defense has been good, the players are saying the same thing.
After their Game 4 loss, LeBron James said the defense wasn’t the problem and pointed out that turnovers were a much bigger negative for the team.
The Rockets might have scored enough to squeak out these pair of wins, but that’s more due to timely baskets by Houston and the Lakers’ inability to throw a pea in the ocean.
In this series, LA has held Houston under 100 points in three games. In the regular season, they only had seven times where they held opponents under the century mark.
The defense might’ve been good enough, but there are two sides to the game. And if you can’t reach at least 100 points in a playoff matchup, then losing is what’s going to happen.
“They made shots,” Marcus Smart said. “You tip the hat off to those guys. They made some shots tonight that they weren’t making in Games 1, 2 and 3. But we understood that. We knew that. We gave ourselves a chance, but we just fell short and it’s part of it. We got to put this one in the back of our mind and move on to the next one.”
The return of Austin Reaves should help the offensive side of things for the Lakers. He scored 22 points coming off the bench and will likely play even more in Game 6.
Los Angeles’ defense has been good enough all series long, and it’s why they are ahead 3-2. But if they want to close this out, they’ll need a bit more scoring to occur.
You can follow Edwin on Twitter at @ECreates88 or on Bluesky at @ecreates88.bsky.social.
