Despite all the injuries and shuffling of lineups and rotation throughout the season, the Lakers’ offense has remained consistently great.
It’s the benefit of having three elite shotmakers on the roster. At some point this season, whether during a quarter, a game or an stretch of contests, each of LeBron James, Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves has carried the Lakers.
As a result, despite the limited amount of games with the Big Three available, the Lakers’ offense ranks as one of the best of the league.
Jaxson Hayes recently shared that sentiment after the purple and gold had one of their best offensive outings of the season in a win in Utah.
“I feel like offensively, our team’s one of the most skilled offensive scoring teams in the league,” Hayes said. “It’s just every night we got to come out and play defense and fly around and play team defense. When we don’t, that’s when we have games like tonight. But I feel like with our offensive system and with the guys we have, we can come out and score every night.”
Currently, the Lakers have an offensive rating of 118.8, which ranks sixth in the league. Since LeBron debuted, that rating is all the way up to 122.9 in 12 games, third-best across the NBA.
In short, LA has been an elite offensive team over the last month after being a great offensive team with Luka and Austin running the show. The question is, as Hayes noted, is whether the defense can show up enough.
Long-term, it’s probably not a great strategy when the playoffs come around to simply lean on outscoring oppoennts, but the Lakers still have quite a bit of time to figure out how to make those improvements before playoff time.
And as they’re doing that figuring out, at least they have a really good offense to lean on to keep racking up wins.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
