JJ Redick has spoken several times this season about his belief in process orientation. It’s a necessary tool for any athlete, especially someone who made his NBA fortune as a shooter by missing more threes than he made. If he knew he was doing the right job, Redick said, he could be happy with the result after the ball left his hand.
He repeated it before the Lakers played the Clippers on Sunday, and he mentioned it again after their lopsided 116-102 loss at the Intuit Dome.
“Every time we made a mistake, they made us pay. But our boys took part. We fought. We stayed together,” the Lakers coach said after the loss. “This is for us, this was a good process for us. We didn’t get the result we wanted.”
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But that message doesn’t resonate in a locker room that has been frustrated with the Lakers’ inconsistencies. LeBron James said the team’s roster construction is the reason for the razor-thin margin for error.
When asked if there were ways for the Lakers to increase those margins, James was blunt internally.
“No,” he said. “This is how our team is structured. We have no room for mistakes – for lots of mistakes.”
James was then asked if the Lakers would have to play near-perfect basketball most nights to win. And again, James basically said that the deficiencies in the roster necessitated this.
“We have no choice,” James said. “I mean… that’s how our team is built. And we have to, we have to play almost perfect basketball.”
James’ comments might have been dismissed as frustration after the Lakers lost for the fourth time in their last six games, but Redick was also realistic about the team’s chances each game. When asked about a portion of the schedule that saw the Lakers play 10 of 12 games in Los Angeles (the Lakers are currently 5-5 there), it was hard to tell whether he was optimistic or fatalistic.
“You can certainly look at a calendar and say this is an easier part of the schedule or this is a more difficult part. Nothing will be easy for our team. And I found that out very early in the season,” Redick said before changing his tone. “And that’s okay. We will keep fighting. … We have 18 losses, so we’re sixth in the loss column. We want to be higher. I think there are a few games that we would all say we should have won. We haven’t had one of those games where you think, “We somehow stole that.” We’ll get a few back at some point. We just have to keep trusting each other and we’ll be fine.”
The numbers, Redick said, are the numbers. Despite being 22-18, the Lakers have a negative point differential – and not a particularly narrow one. With minus 2.6 points, only Utah, New Orleans and Portland performed worse.
“We don’t have much room for error. We can’t create that margin organically either,” Redick said. “Touching the paint, playing the paint-to-great mentality and making the extra pass must be emphasized every day. We don’t have a man on our team who always pulls two players to the ball. We don’t have a guy on our team that has the ability to get past his man one-on-one, get to the paint and spread him out to the sidelines.
“That’s just not our team. So we have to do it through connectivity and through execution. And if we can do that, we’re really good.”
What if the Lakers don’t?
By the end, they’re in a Sunday night mood, asking themselves the big questions that have them, in the words of a longtime NBA scout who watched the Lakers this week, “stuck.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.