Lakers head coach Darvin Ham has tinkered with the team’s starting lineup over the course of the season, but no matter what he tried, he was having difficulty finding one that stuck. According to The Athletic’s Jovan Buha, Ham planned to start Jarred Vanderbilt as the fifth starter alongside LeBron James, Anthony Davis, D’Angelo Russell and Austin Reaves in early February, but injuries to James and Davis sidetracked that plan.
Then, shortly after, Vanderbilt suffered a foot injury and hasn’t played since Feb. 1. A player with a unique skillset who helped propel last year’s late-season run, Vanderbilt’s absence was and is a big blow to the Lakers. According to Buha, there is internal optimism that Vanderbilt will return before the regular season ends next month.
Someone needed to step up in Vanderbilt’s absence and, so far, the Lakers have seen success with Rui Hachimura taking over the fifth starter spot from Vanderbilt and Taurean Prince, the latter of whom has been a starter for most of the year. The Lakers moved to 12-5 with Hachimura in the starting five next to James, Davis, Russell and Reaves after beating the Sixers on Friday.
“I’ve been telling them, like, this is who we are,” Hachimura said. “We’ve been trying a lot of different things, some lineups and all this stuff, but this is the lineup we had in the playoffs and that’s how we won, so it’s simple. … It’s just that we know, we’re just really comfortable playing each other.”
Buha further explores why it took so long for the Lakers to get back to lineups featuring Hachimura, which had success last postseason. As Buha explains, Vanderbilt’s preseason injury caused the team to pick between Hachimura and Prince for early-season starter, and Prince won out due to his professionalism and consistency. Prince’s ties to Ham also helped keep him in the lineup for as long as he was.
But with the team floundering and lineups featuring Prince next to the stars continuing to be outscored, the team made the move to Hachimura. So far, the new starting group is outscoring opponents by 42 points and has a plus-8.0 net differential.
We have more from the Lakers:
- In the same article, Buha writes that while Christian Wood is expected to miss the rest of the regular season with his knee injury, there’s a chance he can make a return for the Play-In Tournament or the playoffs, if the Lakers make it. Wood is averaging 6.9 points and 5.1 rebounds this season.
- Prince missed Friday’s game against the Lakers due to personal reasons but he’s expected to be back in the lineup on Sunday against the Pacers, according to Buha (Twitter links). Prince is averaging 9.0 points and shooting 38.7% from beyond the arc in 66 appearances (49 starts) this season.
- After he’s been in and out of the lineup due to injury over the past couple months, the Lakers are optimistic that Cam Reddish will be available and able to help the team during the final stretch of the season, The Orange County Register’s Khobi Price writes. Reddish has missed 19 of the last 24 games due to a sprained right ankle after originally suffering the injury on Jan. 23. Ham expressed confidence he’ll be able to help sooner than later. “He should be able to find his rhythm pretty quickly,” Ham said of Reddish. “Obviously, there’s gonna be a little bit of rust and it’s always like that when you’ve been out of the lineup. But for the most part, the things he needs to do to help us win, he should be able to fall right back in the pocket pretty smoothly.“
- The Lakers are running more sets and organized offense, leading to the second-best offensive rating in the league over the past two months, Price observes in a separate article. L.A. is continuing to put forth solid halfcourt offensive displays and are thriving in games with controlled offense. “Getting off to good starts, when the offense gets stagnant, we can run a few sets to get the ball popping again,” Russell said. “It’s vital for us. We’ve got a lot of guys, a lot of talent, can easily get in ‘Hero Mode’ and it can hurt us as a team. So just keeping that ball popping. Having everybody trust the pass. It’ll be contagious, making us hard to guard.“
Reminder: a #9 seed in a stacked Western Conference. There is little to no reason to get excited about this latest underachieving version of the relatively abysmal LeBron James-Lakers Era. The LA media fanboys will have something worthwhile to talk about if the Lakers can miraculously climb up to the #6 by season’s end – doing so SHOULD help them avoid their DADDY Nuggets until the conference finals again. No guarantees though.
Whoes excited ?
Seems the only one paying attention to those said fanboys are you … Lakers fans are very very aware of the shortcomings of this team
Not the LA media fanboys, The Human Rain Delay. They still have HIGH expectations for the Lakers and The Chosen DUD this season.
ESPN gag orders don’t apply here. The tinsel town fans aren’t used to hearing bad things about the Lakers. All’s I’ve seen is L.A. be the ratings. Therefore, officials/nba darlings for almost a quarter of a century. My God they’ve won so many games, series, titles undeserved in that span. Also if LeBalco is constantly calling himself the goat, people are allowed to put his game under the microscope.
Why pay attention to them then ? They are just going for clicks and it seems like you keep clicking
Seems like they are fulfilling their duties in disrespect , you have the power to ignore and bring more insightful comments in here
See, that’s the thing though, THRD. I don’t have any notable qualms against the Lakers franchise as a whole. It’s really just that one single player on the team whom I can’t stand and have essentially despised (as an NBA personality) since the transition from the 2016 to the 2017 season. BRAWNY Sensation…..The Chosen Dud. LeBalco. The Baby GOAT….whatever you want to call him. I usually go with the first (B.S. for short), but I like the second as well because I refer to DUD as an acronym – Dumbing Us Down, for which he IS doing to his fans and NBA fans, in general (whether we want to admit it or not). Being on the anti-LeBron side, I completely recognize the amount of time and energy I waste despising him (again, merely as an NBA personality). I know others can interpret my disdain for Brawny as being petty and even sometimes hostile, aggressive, unwarranted….you name it. In all honesty, I view it as a coping mechanism. I think Brawny Sensation is one of the worst things to happen to the NBA, but I didn’t always have that opinion. My own realization that he has become one of the most prolific juicers (and liars) the sport has ever known did not come to fruition until the 2016 NBA Finals. I had seen my fair share of Finals series at that point, dating back to the Magic-Isiah, Lakers-Pistons collisions in the late 80s. I had never before seen such a drastic 180 reversal performance by a (super)star player as I did Brawny Sensation in that series. Just six years prior, if you recall, the LA maintenance crew probably had to scrape all the Game 7 participants of the Lakers-Celtics series off the then Staples Center hardwood. EVERYONE was dead tired. And it SHOWED; even the late great Kobe had to battle exhaustion. Fast forward back (forward) to 2016, and you mean to tell me this Brawny Sensation is just a freak of nature – jumping THROUGH THE ROOF in Game 7; what would amount to, what, something like his 107th or 108th game played of the season??!! The guy was a SCRUB the first four games – sluggish, getting his own shots blocked, disengaged, and severely outplayed. It wasn’t just the fact that the league helped him and the Cavs out by suspending Draymond Green for Game 5. Something else was taking place those final 3 games.
To me, that stretch of games in June 2016 was a tell-tale sign Brawny Sensation has been juicing PROLIFICALLY for a lengthy portion of his career. I would like to think though that he WAS clean for the majority – perhaps the entire duration – of his first stint with the Cavs. Even as an anti-LeBron fan, it is extremely unfortunate to conclude he was not clean in any of his four championship runs. To be so talented at such a young age…..to perhaps have the intent to do it the right way – stick with one team and avoid the temptation of PEDs/HGH…..but to then be frustrated to see a rival in Kobe Bryant attain his 4th and 5th championships while he must have felt he was stuck in mud in Cleveland….it’s tough whether to say one way or another if the Cavs had crossed the finish line with Brawny in tow in either 2009 or 2010, MAYBE the trajectory of his NBA career and popularity would have found itself down a more proper/acceptable course by the majority of the NBA faithful. Such is unfortunately not the case. To have to make THREE transitions (to Miami, back to Cleveland, and then LA) to achieve what plenty of his predecessors accomplished with less (or no) team movement WHILE (and beyond a reasonable doubt) being doped up on some of the finest steroid drugs the world has to offer (especially in 2018 – the MASSIVE shoulders season) is an inditement on all that is wrong with the NBA today. For that, I will WHOLE-HEARTEDLY root against any and every remaining team The Chosen Dud (aka Brawny Sensation) plays for the remainder of his legendary (though heavily tainted) career.
Fair, but idk why you have to bring a whole organization and it’s fans into it
I always hear the played out mantra that Lakers fans are always full of the team but never actually see these said people or their posts ( they certainly don’t exist here whatsoever ) I’m in a couple lakers boards and overall we are a very intelligent community who is very critical and self aware of where we stand year to year… if anything they are too overly critical at times
Now if we are talking Kendrick Perkins and co then yea , but if your watching and absorbing news from Perk, well that just falls on you at that point