After some bright spots in his rookie season and a promising Summer League, Bronny’s sophomore season with the Lakers hasn’t started on a particularly great foot.
With injuries affording him some cameos
early in the year, Bronny hasn’t impressed, to say the least. However, head coach JJ Redick and his staff continued to allow him opportunities this year and their belief finally paid off on Sunday.
While it wasn’t his best performance statistically, it was one of the first times in his career that he’s played meaningful fourth quarter minutes. In total, Bronny played 18 minutes with seven of those coming in the final frame. And, most importantly, he played a notable role in helping the Lakers earn the win over the Heat.
“I thought he was really good on the ball [defensively],” Redick said. “He got a steal off the ball, but I thought he was really good off on the ball and now I’ve seen that twice over the last week or so where he was he was really just a force in terms of containment and physicality.
“And then he made arguably the play of the game when Luka was double-teamed and he was the next guy. He drove the closeout, got in the paint, read the paint swarm and ended up getting his teammate an open three. So just a really good building block for him tonight to play in a very meaningful game in the fourth quarter and have a lot of good plays.”
While it might be an overstatement to call it arguably the biggest play of the game, it was unquestionably a momentum-swinging play.
Bronny made a nice read on the poor closeout, as Redick noted, and then didn’t force things at the rim and found an open Smart for a three. That shot forced a Heat timeout as the Lakers responded to a Miami run with one of their own.
Now, you can pretty easily push back on the “play of the game” superlative, but ultimately, it was a nice read that you’d expect any rotation guard to make. In that sense, it’s progress for Bronny, who has looked little like a rotation guard this season. But on Sunday, he was making the right plays and while he only had two points and two assists, he did finish with three steals and was impactful defensively.
“He was great,” Luka Dončić said. “In those kind of moments, you never know if you’re going to play or not. He was ready and that means a lot to us and he was ready to go at the right moment. He played great today, he was great defensively and we expect him to do that.”
“I thought he was good,” Austin Reaves added in his own postgame scrum. “I thought he played really good minutes, was good defensively, did the right things offensively. The more he continues to get those minutes, the better he’ll be. We needed the minutes that he gave us tonight and looking forward to him continuing to do that.”
The aforementioned two points from Bronny on the night came on a lob from Austin Reaves, which was eerily similar to another Reaves-to-LeBron alley-oop.
“I’ve got to be the first person in NBA history to throw a father a lob and a son a lob…It was cool,” Reaves said. “I told Bron that as soon as I checked out after that. It was a pretty special moment.”
Again, this is all grading on curve with Bronny. The expectations of him versus the expectations of someone like Gabe Vincent are different.
The important challenge now for Bronny is to make this sustainable and consistent. These no longer can be bright flashes in an otherwise dull season. This need to be regular contributions. If he can make that next step as a player, then he could really start earning some rotation minutes.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on BlueSky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
