The Los Angeles Lakers' brutal start to the season continued apace this weekend, with the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs scoring a 13-point win at Staples Center on Friday and the Pacific Division-leading Golden State Warriors absolutely destroying Byron Scott's squad in their visit to L.A. on Sunday night to drop the Lakers to 1-9, the worst 10-game start in franchise history.
The Dubs got virtually anything they wanted against what has been, by far, the NBA's most permissive defense, racking up 115 points through three quarters on 55.6 percent shooting from the field and a sterling 13-for-26 mark from 3-point land, led by sharpshooting All-Star point guard Stephen Curry:
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Just for funsies, let's get another couple of looks at that last fast-break feed to Marreese Speights:
Curry finished with 30 points on 10-for-19 shooting (5-for-9 from deep) to go with a season-high 15 assists and four rebounds against three turnovers in just 30 minutes of work. Speights continued to make the most of the backup minutes at the four and five spots behind Andrew Bogut and Draymond Green with David Lee sidelined, scoring 24 points on 8-for-11 shooting while snagging nine rebounds in 20 1/2 minutes of floor time in a 136-115 win in which virtually the entire second half served as little more than garbage time.
The lone bright-ish spot for Lakers fans, as has been the case throughout this dismal start, was the output of Kobe Bryant, who scored a season-high 44 points in the defeat. But the scoring outburst followed what has become a fairly familiar script:
• L.A. can't get stops without fouling: Golden State hit nine of its first 14 shots and Klay Thompson went to the line five times in the first five minutes;
• Non-Kobe Lakers offer little punch: Everybody else shot a combined 2-for-12 through the first five minutes;
• L.A. digs a big hole quickly: The Warriors had doubled up the Lakers, 24-12, after five minutes, and led by 17 with 4:04 left in the first;
• Kobe says, "Screw it," and escalates his bombing away: That's how you wind up with 24 field-goal attempts by halftime and 34 by the end of the third quarter. (Like every other starter besides Golden State's Harrison Barnes, Bryant sat out the entire fourth.)
One key factor in that sagging shooting percentage: Kobe's really struggling to find open looks these days. The NBA's SportVU player tracking system has data for eight of Bryant's outings this season; in those games, he's taken 196 field-goal attempts, and 154 of them — 78.6 percent — have come against either "tight" defense (meaning the closest defender is between 2 and 4 feet away from the shooter) or "very tight" defense (between 0 and 2 feet away). He's made just 35.1 percent (54-for-154) of those tightly contested shots, compared with 52.4 percent (22-for-42) of his more open tries. He went 7-for-22 on contested attempts against the Warriors, and 8-for-12 when he had at least 3 1/2 feet of daylight.
At issue, of course, is a relative lack of credible threats elsewhere on the roster who could endanger defenses enough to give Kobe more breathing room. While most of us watch the Lakers and see a team seemingly designed to get Kobe as many shots as possible as he works to climb the all-time scoring list — next up: Michael Jordan — Bryant claimed after Sunday's loss that this isn't the way he wants to play.
“I’m more than willing to sit back,” Bryant said after the game, according to Janis Carr of the Orange County Register. “If you think I want to shoot this many times and be as aggressive at 36 years old, you’re freaking crazy.”
"I'd always rather get guys involved and play," Bryant added, according to Baxter Holmes at ESPN Los Angeles. "That's always the intent at the start of the ball game. But [when] you're 10, 12 points in the hole, I've got to try to keep us in the ball game at some point. But it's tough. It's tough."
The problem, though, is that this version of Bryant — 36 years old, his footwork still pristine but his legs lacking lift and explosion, with ample willingness but waning athleticism and accuracy — is less likely to shoot you back into a game than to shoot you further out of one. And while defenders will always have respect for Kobe's cult of personality, he's no longer striking fear in the hearts of the opposition when he raises up again, and again, and again.
"When we look up there and see we're winning by 30 or 40 points, that 44 is really irrelevant," Speights said after the game, according to Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group.
Similarly rendered irrelevant by Bryant's approach: the rest of the Lakers. L.A.'s other four starters combined took just one more shot (10-for-35 from the field) than Bryant (15-for-34) and, with the exception of center Jordan Hill (15 points, 11 rebounds in 25 1/2 minutes), failed to make much of an impact with the opportunities they did get ... which, in turn, led to fewer opportunities as Kobe continued to hoist away.
It's a thorny problem to untangle: Is Kobe at fault for failing to trust his teammates to help carry the load, or are the rest of the Lakers to blame for failing to hold up their end of the bargain when the ball swings their way?
“We ran some sets, but we really just got the ball to Kobe and he was extremely aggressive,” said power forward Carlos Boozer (six points on 3-for-13 shooting in 21 minutes) after the game, according to Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News. “His focus was to score for us. We did. But the rest of us weren’t in a good rhythm. It was tough for us to get in a good rhythm. We got to figure out a way where we can all contribute on offense and help each other on defense.”
That lack of rhythm, or any real discernible means of getting into one, left point guard Jeremy Lin (scoreless on 0-for-2 shooting with just one assist in 22 minutes) nearly speechless after the game:
It feels instructive that Lin describes the Lakers' primary issues as a dearth of communication, trust and effort. Because when Bryant talks about why he feels he has to play this way, it seems like he's perceiving a lack of effort that makes it hard for him to trust that anyone else is going to step forward ... and if Kobe and everyone think the Lakers' problems are exactly the same but that they're being caused by completely different things, then there sure would seem to be a failure to communicate in the L.A. locker room.
More from Holmes:
"Obviously I'd rather get guys involved early, but if a purse gets stolen in front of you, how many blocks are you going to let the guy run?" [Bryant] asked.
"You going to chase him down and keep him in sight yourself or just wait for the authorities to get there, or decide to let him run and wait for the authorities to get there? It's a tough thing." [...]
"I'd rather not have to do that," Bryant said, "but you can't just sit back and watch crime happen in front of you."
And from Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times:
"Maybe I’m being too aggressive. Maybe I’ve got to let the person run a couple more blocks and let the authorities come. Those are things that I have to evaluate."
That evaluation process figures to be painful. With precious few actual NBA defenders on the roster and no cavalry on the way — I mean, Nick Young's not going to propel you out of the points-allowed-per-possession basement — opponents seem likely to continue beating the Lakers like they stole something.
Hat-tip to SB Nation's Tom Ziller.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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