With both teams suffering a slew of injuries to key players, this Lakers-Rockets series hasn’t exactly been beautiful basketball. All of the games have featured offensive struggles and the winning team having to grit and grind their way to victory.
The Lakers have been the better team under these conditions and won the first three games. In Game 4, though, they couldn’t complete the first-round sweep and were blown out by the Rockets.
Los Angeles out-rebounded Houston and scored more points in the
paint despite Alperen Şengün having a stellar game, so why weren’t they able to pull off the win?
LeBron James offered an explanation postgame.
“Defense wasn’t our problem tonight,” LeBron said. “It was our offense. Defense wasn’t our problem. I mean, s—, we turned the ball over 23 times for 30 points?… Defense wasn’t our problem. It was offense.”
Not only did the Lakers turn the ball over constantly, but even when they held possession, they didn’t do much with it. As a team, they went 5-22 from 3-point range, which equals a woeful 23% from deep.
LA scoring just 96 points in Game 4, just isn’t enough to win many postseason games. Even in victories, the purple and gold have struggled offensively. In these playoffs, they have an offensive rating of 108.6, which ranks 11th out of 16 playoff teams.
“This is a top ten defense the entire season,” Lakers head coach JJ Redick said. “It’s obviously very challenging without your two leading scorers to generate offense. We’ll take a look at the process again on that end as well. I know our points per shot and our expected points per shot were slightly below our season average. So, to me, it goes back to the two keys. Take care of the ball and we’ll look at that and how we can be better there.”
The Lakers might not have to worry about missing their two best scorers anymore, as Austin Reaves is expected to return for Game 5.
If he does, then that gives LA a tremendous offensive boost. Reaves averages 23.3 points per game and is a much more reliable player to depend on to score 20-plus points than, say, Marcus Smart and Luke Kennard, who have done it during this series, but can’t regularly.
“Again, they played a great game,” Redick said. “I think our guys came into the game with the right intent. [Houston] certainly played a really good offensive game. They didn’t do anything differently. We can certainly be better with some of our small details whether it be pick and roll up to touch, our shifts, all that stuff. Our shifts to close, we did a better job of boxing out tonight but some of that was they made more shots. We’re going to look at it over the next two days and get better.”
Despite the offensive struggles, the Lakers are still in the driver’s seat. They are up 3-1, have Game 5 at home up next and have home court in case somehow this series goes the distance.
If they can make the appropriate adjustments and get Reaves back, they can still easily win and advance to play the Thunder.
The main path towards that outcome is to improve offensively. So far, Redick and the Lakers have proven that when things need fixing, they get it done. We’ll see if they do so in Game 5.
You can follow Edwin on Twitter at @ECreates88 or on Bluesky at @ecreates88.bsky.social.
