The Lakers dropped their fourth straight sport on Friday after shedding to the Grizzlies, and Los Angeles is now 17-19, one sport out of a play-in event spot at No. 11 within the convention. This comes off the heels of successful the NBA’s in-season event final month.
“We simply suck proper now,” LeBron James stated after the sport, according to ESPN’s Dave McMenamin.
Since successful the in-season event in Las Vegas, the Lakers have gone 3-10. Nonetheless, James downplayed the burden that carried in evaluating the Lakers’ season in full.
“That was simply two video games,” James stated. “It’s a small pattern. Everyone seems to be getting so cracked up about Vegas and maintain citing Vegas. It was two video games. We took care of that enterprise. It was the in-season event, we performed it, we gained it. However that was actually simply two video games.”
The Lakers’ frustrations have boiled over, with reports surfacing over the past week about coach Darvin Ham‘s disconnect with the locker room. Ham stated an excessive amount of emphasis has been positioned on Los Angeles’s latest losses.
“I’m uninterested in folks dwelling and dying with each single sport we play,” Ham stated. “It’s ludicrous, truly. It’s like, come on, man, this can be a marathon. And we hit a tricky stretch. It’s the identical crew. … We performed some high-level video games a short while in the past, and we simply acquired to get again to that. We acquired to maintain the combat going. We can not lose our combat.”
The Lakers are with out rotation gamers in D’Angelo Russell, Rui Hachimura and Gabe Vincent, additional complicating their struggles forward of the commerce deadline. Nonetheless, gamers have continually refused to make use of accidents as an excuse.
“We nonetheless have a whole lot of basketball left,” Anthony Davis stated. “However we’re trending within the unsuitable course proper now. And the very last thing we’d like, particularly when guys are out, is to separate and crumble. So we acquired to remain collectively, for certain, and determine it out. We will’t be in our emotions. We will’t be complaining or no matter. We will’t take something private.
“We now have to look individually, myself, everybody within the locker room, the teaching workers, take a look at ourselves within the mirror and work out what we are able to do individually higher to assist the crew be higher. And I believe then we are able to come out and flip issues round.“
