176.LeBron passes Malone but Lakers blow it

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In Michigan one eight seven seven eight Hope and Why or text hope and Why to four six seven three six nine in New York. In Tennessee redline dial one eight hundred eight eight nine nine seven eight nine in Tennessee. Visit www one dot one eight hundred gambler dot net in West Virginia. All right, welcome to Lakers Tonight, presented by FanDuel Here at the Volume, I am Jason Timp Happy Saturday, everybody. I hope your guys weekends are off

to a good start. I'm not sure that I've ever hated a basketball team as much as I've hated this Lakers team. There's something so off about the way they approached the game that is offensive to all fans, and I know all of you guys can relate to me in that regard. We are going to break this game

down in its entirety. We are going to talk about Lebron passing, Carl Malone and then if you guys stick around at the end, we're gonna talk a little bit about Steph Curry's injury, what that means for the Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves have won ten of their last eleven games, and they've beat a bunch of really good teams. So we're gonna dive into that and what that means and what I think of them in particular. But let's

start with the Lakers. You know, I've tweeted this or said it on the podcast at least a half dozen times this year, but this Lakers team is allergic to success. And what I mean by that is every time they do something good and are handed some sort of reward for their action, they immediately relax. They do not use that as a motivation to keep pushing. They use it as an excuse to pull their foot off the gas. So they're up thirty six six at the end of

the first quarter. And the most important thing that I noticed was defensive effort, but particularly at the point of attack. Everybody was doing a good job sliding their feet, keeping people in front, and then on every time they got to stop, they forced people to shoot over the top. This is a Wizard's team that's down a bunch of bodies tonight, right. You know, Kyle Kuzma is out of the game, Bradley Bills out for the season, so they're

limited offensively. So when they slide their feet and compete on defense, they get stops. And then they started running the other way in transition and getting all sorts of easy baskets in the full court transition possessions. But in the last three quarters of the game, everything that they did to build that ten point lead, everything that contributed to their success, they stopped doing. They completely let their

foot off the gas. Defensively. They gave up a hundred and one points in the final three quarters and as a result, they gave Washington a chance. And then at the end of the game, when you give teams a chance, it becomes a maker miss league. Lebron misses a wide open three on the left wing, Christaps Porzingis makes a three at the top of the key. You throw now all of a sudden efforts not an issue because you are playing hard in crunch time. But now those ugly habits.

I talked about this last night with Toronto, a sloppy basketball team that has been sloppy l season will be sloppy when they need to play solid basketball. It's it's those habits are not in place, and so even though the effort is there, they're gonna make silly mistakes, and they did. I talked a lot over the last week about the way teams like Dallas have been using double teams to compensate for their lack of side and they have that down to a science. The Lakers do not

have that. So when the Wizards started going down to Kristaps Porzingis and crunch time against Lebron and against Stanley Johnson again, just by having some reasonable double and recover scheme, they would be able to handle Christaps Porzingis. He's not a good enough player to kill you in a game like that, But the Lakers aren't sharp in those areas of the game. The Lakers are not a team that has established a scheme that that they have all of

the details ironed out. So when that happened, they couldn't handle Kristaps Porzingis. They got killed by that mismatch. A couple of shots missed for you, A couple of shots make for them game over. And that's what I'm talking about. When I when I talk about this saying they're allergic to success. If they understood how they got that ten point lead in the first quarter, and they replicated it for the second quarter, maybe you're up twenty five. Maybe

the dynamic of the game changes. You're replicated in the third quarter, you're up thirty. Now Lebron sits out in the fourth quarter. Now it's we're having fun on the sideline while the young guys are the bench players are out on the floor doing their things. They are allergic to success. They don't understand why they have good results and why they have bad results. They haven't been able

to make that association. And because of that, they haven't made the necessary efforts and the necessary steps to establish those habits in order to actually have some consistent success more than one quarter of things going well, more than one quality win. What if the Lakers put together three or four quality wins. We haven't seen that all season because this team doesn't have the basketball character to do that.

Here in a few minutes, I'm gonna talk about what this team could look like with Anthony Davis coming back. What is the best case scenario for this team? And it has a lot to do with those habits. I'll get to that in a minute. I wanted to get to Lebron because you know, in this complete travesty of a season, he is one of the rare bright spots. He is still playing arguably the best basketball of his career and at least on the offensive end of the

floor in his nineteen season, which is absolutely amazing. You passed, car I'm alone tonight. It's obviously a big moment. To me. The most the most important element to Lebron's scoring longevity, what got him to this point is the way he developed as a jump shooter. It talked about this a lot, uh the other night when he had fifty again talking about his shot making ability. But it's pretty crazy to see the transition that Lebron's underwent over the course of

this last decade. So we back up to two thousand thirteen, so about nine years ago in the in in the finals against Greg Popovich. Mind you, this is literally ten years into his career. He is established in the heart of his prime. He's a defending champion. He's got four m vps at this point, so he's already like firmly in the top ten players of all time. Hot on MJ's heels with lots of years left, he's already established,

but he had a glaring weakness. He wasn't a good jump shooter, at least in the previous season, and even throughout most of that series, Gregg Popovitch, playing off of Lebron really messed with him. He didn't have He had some proficiency with his jump shot that hadn't matched up with his confidence in his jump shot, and so when Gregg Popovitch did that, it got in Lebron's head a

little bit. And in the early portions of that series, Lebron really struggled mentally with the coverage that Gregg Popovitch was throwing at him. But he breaks through, right He breaks through in game six, in game seven, makes a bunch of jump shots, particularly in Game seven. He makes five threes in that game and the rest is history.

Since that day, Lebron has been an incredible jump shooter this season, coming into tonight, in his last seven games now eight because he was four for ten again tonight, So in his last eight games he's averaging over nine three point shots per game attempted and making over them. So here we were halfway through his career well established in the heat of his prime. He had a major week this and here we are nine years later, and he has not only rectified that weakness, but it's now

a strength. If you go into NBA dot Com and you pull up all the three point shooters in the league that are attempting at least seven threes per game, there's like thirty guys in the league that are that high volume three point shooting, and Lebron's right in the middle of the pack in terms of percentage, and he's ahead of a lot of big name guys who that you think of his three point shooters. That's what Lebron has turned himself into. He is now a league average

high volume three point shooters. So I translate that to he's one of the better three point shooters in the league. That is an incredible accomplishment for a player that already had so much in his bag, that already had so many, so many things accomplished, and yet he just continued to

adapt and continued to evolve. It's a testament to his work ethic and it's the reason why he's here today, averaging thirty points per game in his nineteen season on over sixt tru shooting, passing Karl Malone and looking like one of the best players in the world. That that's what that took. As he's lost that little bit of athleticism. He needed to adapt, he needed to evolve. It's like the opposite of Russell Westbrook in so many different ways,

and it's been interesting to see. I remember back in it was like either two thousand and sixteen or two thousand and seventeen, Lebron had a bad jump shooting game and one of a reporter asked him about it, and Lebron flat out said to the reporter, I wish I could remember more of the details, but he specifically said to the reporter, I'm not a jump shooter. That's not

what I do. That was his mentality kind of at that time, like he had worked to the point where he could shoot well enough, but it wasn't you know, was something that was his bread and butter. Now, I bet you if you asked Lebron that same question, he would pridefully answer that he believes he's a great shooter. And that's that's where again, that's where the stubbornness has to fade away. Compare that type of approach to what

you've seen from Russ. You need to as you get older, be willing to read the writing on the wall, see what's still working for you, see what's not working for you anymore, to watch films, see where opportunities are. And I think Lebron understood that the easiest way for his to him to extend his prime was to become a better three point shooter, and he took advantage of that, and that's why he's still where he is in the league.

At this point, you know you're gonna see a lot of nefarious characters, people that have bad intentions tried to undercut these statistical accomplishments from Lebron at this point in his career, which for the record upfront is flat out stupid and unfair, jealous. It's just ugly behavior from those people, because the reality of the situation is Lebron has won more championships than any player or franchise since he came into the league in two thousand three. He's been to

the finals ten times. His winning resume speaks for itself. If you want to try to pretend like he's not all about that get out of here man like, for instance, he very easily could have sat out tonight on the back of a back tail end of a back to back and played in Cleveland and had this accomplishment in

front of his home fans. Credit to Lebron for seeing a winnable game on the resume or on the schedule and thinking he had an opportunity to get his team some buffer and the standings under the circumstance, especially with their schedule coming up. But like, what's so interesting about it to me is if you remember after in two thou seventeen when the Lake when the Calves won the

Eastern Conference. After the game, there was some footage in the locker room of him telling all of his teammates like, Hey, this isn't guaranteed. Enjoy this moment, Enjoy the little victories.

And it's it's super interesting to me because Lebron is a guy again who's been to the mountaintop more than anybody, any team, any coach, Andy GM and anybody right now in this ere except for Greg Popovitch, I suppose, But at this point, you know, uh, like it's easy to lose sight of the perspective of the fact that only one team can win an NBA championship and understand that you're gonna go up to bat, you know, so many times in your career, and you're not guaranteed to win

it every time. So in those years when you don't, you have to take time to appreciate and take time to relax and kind of soak in the little accomplishments along the way. That's always been one of Lebron's major philosophies, and I think that's what he views with this accomplishment. He knows he's a winner. He knows anybody who's being you know, objective about this, knows he's a winner. And he knows that this is a big deal. You know, Lebron. You could make the case that I said this in

the video I released earlier. You can make the case that just his scoring is enough to put him in the goat conversation. You know, when you look at a guy like MJ or Kobe, it's this two way dominant score, right, a guy who could score in a million different ways, especially in crunch time, and can guard the other team's

best player. Well, even if I just simplified Lebron's game down to that, his ability to do things defensively as a versatile perimeter defender, and his ability to score the basketball. He's every bit as good at those things as the all time greats. He's every bit as good at those

things as Kobe, as MJ. That's what makes his goat case so compelling, because he has so much more that he brings to the table as a basketball player then just those two things, and and and that's why I think it's important to appreciate these accomplishments, to take that time. You're not guaranteed Lebron next year. I expect the Lakers, if health, health willing, I expect the Lakers to be very firmly in the top tier of contenders. I think they learned a bunch of valuable lessons this year. I

think they're gonna approach the season way more seriously. I think they're gonna get more, They're gonna fix a lot of the issues they made. They're gonna be relevant again next year. The focus can be winning. And you know, maybe when Anthony Davis gets back and they're in the play and the focus can't be winning. But right now, I understand and I respect the idea that you of Lebron just taking advantage of the small victories and taking the time to appreciate. Start your bracket with a bang.

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six nine in New York. In tennessee redline dial one eight hundred eight eight nine nine I have an eight nine In tennessee visit www one dot one eight hundred gambler dot net in West Virginia that really quickly before we move on from the Lakers, I wanted to I've been work thinking about this over the course of the last week, because the Lakers have been playing a little bit better basketball. Not great, but they're playing a little bit better basketball. They should have won tonight. They should

be on a little bit of a windstreak here. So what is the best version of this Lakers team? What does it look like with Anthony Davis coming back? And does it have enough to make a run at things? And when you start to look at the pieces available, it doesn't look that bad. If you look in the front court, I've got Lebron and Anthony Davis, which is as good of a front court as you'll find anywhere in the league. You've got when in Gabriel now is another guy that kind of like is the opposite of

the Dwight in the DeAndre Jordan's. He's thinner, much faster, can get up and down the floor with the style that the Lakers play, can guard on the perimeter better. They can almost use him as a wing in a lot of ways. That's interesting. Then you go on the wing and you've got Stanley Johnson. He's okay, you know,

car Melo. Anthony's not really a defensive wing, but he accomplishes a lot of what a Wayne can do offensively, and you've got Austin Reeves who's one of the better off ball players in the league already as a rookie, so they're pretty decent on the wing. And then you look at the guards and you've got Russell Westbrook, who we do not need to talk about. Let's just leave that on the side. And then we've got Taylor Horton Tucker,

who's an okay backup guard right in the league. And then you've got Malik Monk, who's a offensive microwave type of guy, gives a lot back on defense, but he's definitely a net positive type of player. And then you've got some depth. You've got DJ Augustine, You've got Avery Bradley and Dwight Howard, guys that complain specific matchups when you need something. They've got nine solid guys in that rotation.

So in theory, this is still a team that has a puncher's chance to beat anybody, because if you've got seven solid rotation players with Lebron and a D they should be able to beat anybody if something's break right correct. But they, like we talked about earlier, they don't have the habits and what's concerning to me is if you asked me, Jason, how does Lebron in a d work their way through the playing tournament and beat Phoenix in

the first round. How do they do that? I would tell you it starts right now, right at this moment. For the rest of the season, they need to work on establishing habits. Treated as like a like a three week long training camp. You've got three weeks here, you got you know roughly what I think twelve games. Take these twelve games, treat them like a training camp. Really build out those habits. Take it seriously so that when Anthony Davis gets back, you have the habits to match

your talent. Are they the most talented team in the league. No, but we've been over that. They're not good enough with their role players. But they have a puncher's chance to beat anybody. So if you attach that with championship level habits, then they can win. They need to show us over the course of the next few weeks that they can put multiple games together of success. Now do I think that's going to happen. No, That's why I said this

is the best case scenario. But if are in that locker room and you're looking at each other and you're like, hey, are we gonna go for this or not. That's what you have to deal with. That's what that needs to be, the actionable item. It's one thing to sit in the locker room and say, hey, guys, when a D gets back,

we're gonna make a run at this. No, you have some steps you gotta get through first, and that and and right now, you've got to somehow distance yourself entirely from the previous you know, psychology of this team and somehow start fresh and build a new identity around this group of guys. There's enough new faces in there with d J. Augustine, with when you in Gabriel, with Stanley Johnson. You've got enough new faces in there to try to do that. They just got to do that. But here

we are again. I think it's March nineteen, and they just showed us again that that's not who they are. So that's why what I'm laying out is the best case scenario and not the most likely scenario for those of you who are just joining us. This is Lakers Tonight, presented by FanDuel here at the volume. I wanted to move on for to Steph Curry for a second, because is we haven't had a chance to talk about him

since his injury. I've done as much digging as I can and paid as close attention as I can to the reports that have come out, and it sounds to me like there's optimism that he's coming back before the end of the season. It's gonna be very similar to what happened to Lebron last year. Guy dives into his leg, suffers a lower leg injury, gonna be coming back with just a handful of games left. I think Lebron came

back with four games left last season. They might be able to get three or four with step this year. You know, back in December, I did a list of what I said were my best contenders, my top contenders in the league, the teams that I thought were most likely to win the championship, And at that point in time, I had the Golden State Warriors number one because they were so incredible defensively, and at that time Steph was still playing well. Steph was a top tier superstar, like

one of the best players in the world. And I'm always going to defer to those kinds of guys, especially when they have an unbelievable defense, and they had Clay Thompson on the way back, Jordan Pool was playing well. There was a lot of reasons to be optimistic that that Golden State team could be really good. But then Steph went into a slump. And in the times that I've talked about the Warriors since I've said one thing

very consistently. The only way that the Warriors are going to win the title is Steph Curry has a nuclear playoff run, absolute peak Steph thirty plus points per game, you know, uh true shooting knocking down half his threes. That's what it's gonna take for this team to win. And he's not really shown anything. He's had these little burst where things have looked a little better, but he's not as bad as he was in January. But he

has not a set. He has not shown us a consistent stretch of the old staph and so the injury is frustrating on that front because he's a perimeter player who relies on his handle in his jump shot, which means he's very dependent on rhythm. For those of you have played the game at some level, whether that's you know, in high school, college, or even if you just play in your men's league. You're familiar with the concept rhythm. You have to feel comfortable with the basketball and confident

with the basketball. That does not happen, but the flip of a switch. It takes time. It's so the the idea of Steph busting out of his slump becomes way less likely now that he's sitting out with the lower leg injury. The only like silver lining that you could cling to is if maybe, just maybe his slump was associated with another nagging lower body injury and somehow he can rectify both of those during this rehab. Kind of like Anthony Davis when he sprained his knee. He was

not looking good before the knee injury. Then he went down, then he came back, and when he came back, he looked spry, right, he looked lighter, he looked like he was faster. He had all of these you know, this kind of this newfound physical energy. Right, maybe that happens with Steph. I don't think it's likely, but that's the best case scenario. The whole thing was Steph getting hurt is exactly what frustrates me so much about this Lakers team,

because is Lebron getting hurt. That's gonna happen. He got hurt a couple of times this year. Anthony Davis getting hurt, that's gonna happen. But it's all about getting healthy at the right time. And right now you're seeing some teams around the league, particularly two of the top tier contenders, Golden State and Phoenix, dealing with some injuries. You could be getting healthy while the other teams are on the down downward trajectory. But instead, you messed around all season

from day one of training camp. You didn't take it seriously. So you're a bad basketball team. So now instead of being a team that can capitalize on things. Look at Milwaukee last year. We talked about them last night. They were nineteen and seventeen against five hundred and above teams. They were not a dominant regular season team. Yeah, you know, Janice kind of fell by the wayside a lot in the discourse. But look at what happened. Lebron and Anthony

Davis got hurt. You had all the injuries that happened to the Brooklyn Nets, you know, like like they Trey Young got hurt in the conference finals. So some things broke right from Milwaukee. Next thing, you know, they're holding the trophy. That's that's the way things can break in the NBA, and that's why it's so important to always keep your eye on the prize even as you're dealing with little nagging injuries and things along those lines. That's

what annoys me about this Laker team. I would like Lebron and a d s as a puncher chance against anybody in the league if something's broke right, and I don't know that they are even remotely close enough to the level of basketball, not talent, just basketball to be able to compete in any of those environments. All Right, before we get out of here, I wanted to really

quickly hit on the Minnesota Timberwolves. So they are ten and one in their last eleven games in that stretch, they have the number one offense and number one defense in the entire NBA. They have the best net rating in the league in that stretch by nine point eight points over second place. They beat the Bucks, the Lakers, the Heat, the Warriors, and the Calves in this stretch, So it sounds amazing, right. A little bit of context. When they played the Bucks, they didn't have j Honice.

When they played the Lakers, they didn't have Anthony Davis. When they played the Heat, they didn't have Jimmy Butler, when they played the Warriors, they didn't have Dreamond Green, and when they played the Calves, they didn't have Darius Garland. The last time they played a healthy contender was the Philadelphia seventy sixers in that first game with James Harden at home, and they got utterly obliterated. So, to be clear, you have to take care of business in the NBA.

Like look at the Lakers. They can't even beat bad teams at this point, so I never want to undercut success. They are playing really good basketball right now, but they've had some good fortune with the injuries. Looking at the team specifically, there's a lot of things that I like about them because of their the what they've done in the draft. They're actually pretty athletic on the wing. Jared Vanderbilt and Jaden McDaniels bring that kind of athleticism and

that dirty work element that's so important. Torrian Prince has also helped on that front. Carl Towns is one of the better matchup problems that you have in the league. Right That's always gonna make me optimistic about a team in the playoffs. The reason why I'm not stoked on Minnesota, the reason why I don't think there as good as any of these other teams that I've been showcasing on this show recently, is their guards are too irradic. Anthony

Edwards is young, super talented. This is nothing to be said about his ceiling, But D'Angelo Russell and Anthony Edwards are not going to be able to execute with that that slow down, methodical, super intelligent basketball that they're going to have to play to beat the super top tier teams in the league. If you're gonna outduel Steph Curry, if you're gonna outdue that Phoenix Suns team with Chris Paul or god forbid you, you know, make it to the finals and you have to beat somebody out East,

you have to be able to execute. This is something I talked about a lot with these other contenders, right like, how did how do they stack up against the best? And I would say Anthony Edwards and D'angela Russell is perimeter Excuse me as perimeter decision makers are gonna be at near the end of that list in terms of teams that are gonna be in this playoff runs. So they're playing some good basketball right now, a lot to

get excited about. But I wish they had that one really savvy perimeter decision maker that could settle them down and get them into their stuff, get them calm when things are going bad, get to get the ball to the right guy when he's hot and has it going. Those are the kinds of things that would make me more optimistic about that team. And obviously, because Carl Towns is a post player, he's not a He's not a

guy who can initiate from the perimeter. That limits what he can do in the half court of a playoff series when teams are really dialed in on him as well. So good timber Wolves basketball here in the last couple of weeks, but I'm not as high on them as their fans probably are. All right, guys, that is all we have for tonight. We will be back Monday after the Lakers play in Cleveland. As always, I sincerely appreciate your guys support, and I will see you the volume