LeBron James calls Lakers’ 41-point loss to Heat ’embarrassing,’ but this is far from a one-game problem

There was never a moment in which Wednesday’s contest between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat was especially close.

The last lead the Lakers held was 6-3. Miami had its first double-digit lead less than halfway into the first quarter. They led by 17 at halftime and won by 41 when the final buzzer rang. It was a wire-to-wire decimation, an effort that the Lakers were deeply unsatisfied with.

“I’m embarrassed, we’re embarrassed,” coach JJ Redick said after the 134-93 loss that dropped his team to 12-10. “It’s not a game that I thought we had the right fight, the right professionalism. Not sure what was lost in translation. There has to be some ownership on the court.” 

LeBron James echoed the sentiment, saying that he was “definitely embarrassed” as well and that he agreed with everything his coach said. 

“There’s no schemes or Xs and Os that are gonna get you through that,” James said. “If you don’t want to come to compete, then that’s other issues. We gotta figure it out.”

That lack of competitiveness was especially brutal on defense. A quick glance at social media through the game offered plenty of demoralizing clips.

They didn’t even wait until the fourth quarter to seemingly wave the white flag.

Blowout losses becoming common for Lakers

Wednesday night’s showing is the sort of loss a team hopes to experience, at most, once in a season. The reality for the Lakers is that losses like these are growing increasingly common. 

They’ve lost four games by 25 or more points in the last 12 days: a 127-102 defeat against the Nuggets, a 127-100 loss to the Suns and a 109-80 defeat by the Timberwolves on Monday leading into this game. All of them have followed a similar pattern, with shaky starts leading into the dam bursting in the second half. They lost the four third quarters in those games by a combined 59 points.

You can blame just about anyone for that string of defeats if you try hard enough. Redick has drawn praise for almost everything he’s done as coach of the Lakers, but his team ranks 26th in second-half net rating at -9.3, suggesting that whatever adjustments he’s making at halftime just aren’t working. James is in visible decline, vacillating between his old, legendary self and a shell of it on a game-to-game basis. 

Anthony Davis started the season on an MVP trajectory, but is averaging just 18 points in his last seven games as he deals with plantar fasciitis. Role players are injured across the board. Even at full strength, it’s a flawed group filled with overlapping skill sets and glaring deficiencies. Just about everybody involved is at fault to some extent here.

Reality: The Lakers just aren’t very good

How surprised should we be by a game or even a stretch like this from the Lakers? The simplest solution, through roughly one-quarter of the season, is that the Lakers simply raised expectations a bit too high with their 10-4 start when the reality is that this just isn’t a very good team.

You don’t have to look hard to find evidence of that. Despite being two games over .500, they are tied for the NBA’s 23rd-ranked net rating with the 7-15 Toronto Raptors at -4.7. Granted, they’ve played a relatively tough schedule thus far, but they’ve mostly fattened up on bad teams. They are 7-1 against teams below .500, but 5-9 against teams above .500. 

The schedule doesn’t figure to get much easier in a loaded Western Conference, and the Lakers got some pretty unsustainable opponent’s shooting luck during their 10-4 start. Their opponents made 34% of their wide-open 3s in those first 14 games, among the lowest figures in the league, but they’ve risen back up to 42.6% in the 2-6 stretch that followed. That stretch likely would have been a 1-7 disaster had Utah Jazz coach Will Hardy not called an ill-advised timeout before Collin Sexton’s potential game-winning layup on Sunday.

The samples are still small enough that the team isn’t going to overreact. Maybe the team is better when healthier. Maybe there are adjustments that can coax better effort out of the role players, especially later in games. But the evidence right now points to the Lakers being a lottery-level team hiding behind a standings buffer that is quickly fading. There aren’t easy solutions here besides trading picks — picks the Lakers barely have — for role players that may or may not help.

This all sounds grim, but it was always a possibility for a team built around a soon-to-be 40-year-old. 

A younger James and healthier Davis covered a lot of problems for an otherwise questionable roster, and now that they can’t, all of those existing problems are getting worse and worse by the game.