For much of the LeBron James era, one of the defining characteristics of the team, more often than not, was how much they struggled in third quarters.
For some reason, the halftime adjustments discussed in the locker room needed some sort of nesting period before taking effect. More often than not, that meant the Lakers were playing from behind in the second half.
This season, though, the script has flipped and the Lakers are sailing unchartered waters. Albeit with a small sample size, not only are the Lakers no longer
a bad third quarter team, they’re best team in the league out of the locker room.
That was evidenced to some degree in the team’s recent win over the Blazers. After spending much of the first half missing seemingly every open shot possible, the Lakers came out of the locker room with a big run in the third period to take control of the game.
“I wouldn’t call it adjustments,” Redick said of his halftime talk on Friday. “We cleaned up what we talked about. This is becoming a theme. It’s just like, I think the guys are doing a great job of responding at halftime. We’ve had really good third quarters. I just, at some point, I hope we’re better with our execution on the defensive end to start the game. But they always, so far this year, they’ve responded nearly every time at halftime to just cleaning things up.”
What a change.
In that game on Friday, the Lakers showed composure to keep plugging away despite what they were doing not producing results in the first half. Eventually, all those open shots they created started to fall and the tides turned, leading to a victory.
“We just stuck to the game plan,” Austin Reaves said of the approach in the second half. “We talked about it in timeouts, halftime, for us to only be down seven with the lack of shots that were made, it was kind of impressive, honestly. To be in a game like that against a really good team, it was just stay the course. We’re going to make shots and, obviously, Luka doing what he does willed us to that win.”
Ideally, the Lakers wouldn’t need to be a great third quarter team and can just be a consistent force throughout all four quarters. It’s also not like the team is bad in the first half as they rank eighth in net rating in the first quarter and sixth in net rating in the second quarter.
It’s just that their net rating in the third quarter of 29.7 is 12 points higher than any other team in the period. The fourth quarter is the only frame where they don’t rank in the top ten, though it’s a figure that could be influenced negatively by some pretty woeful late-game sequences against the Clippers and Raptors.
Through 10 games, everything can be chalked up to a small sample size, so it’ll be interesting to see if this is a trend that will continue. But it certainly was startling, if also true, to see Redick call the Lakers a good third quarter team after Friday’s win.
Look how far we’ve come.
