Luka Dončić against the Timberwolves of Minnesota was felt as one of the safest bets throughout the playoff field. He played them a year ago. It didn’t end well for Minnesota.
The Dallas Mavericks sent them home in five games. Dončić averaged 32.4 points in that series. He submitted Rudy Gobert to another year of teasing when he drew the change in the final possession of game 2 and cooked the defensive player of the year for a triple winner of the game. Dončić kept Minnesota out of the NBA Finals a year ago. Surely he would set the Timberwolves on fire again, right?
Well … yes and no. Dončić scored 37 points in game 1 on Saturday, but his new team, the Los Angeles Lakers, lost in a 117-95 blowout. If you are looking for an immediate explanation of why, you consider two of the most important teammates that Dončić had the last postseason: Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford. Dončić distributed 41 assists in the finals of the West Conference last year, and more than half of them (22) went to their two centers. Of those 22, 10 they arrived in a single type of pass, a lobe, which is possibly the best pass in the Arsenal of Dončić.
Now think of the Dončić list currently plays. The only center to play constantly is Jaxson Hayes, which is not as good as Gafford or Lively basically any respect. He played eight minutes in game 1. The Lakers lost those minutes for 11 points. They played the rest of the game without a center. Dončić repaired only one assistance. It was only the second time in his career that he had had a penny in a playoff game.
Suddenly, what happened on Saturday makes a little more meaning. On the exchange deadline, the Lakers almost acquired a new starting center in the great man of Charlotte Hornets, Mark Williams. They rejected the treatment of their physique. Only time will say if that was the right decision in the great scheme of things. We do not know how healthy Williams will be in five years. We do not know what center the Lakers will add this low season. Here are too many variables to make a long -term statement. However, in the short term, game 1 made it clear how bad the Lakers miss even having a single reliable big man.
The absence was felt in all the ways you would expect. 42-33 were exceeded during the competitive part of the game, and allowed 23 second chance points, which would have last classified in the league if it were a full season average. They were also surpassed in 42-30 paint before garbage time, and the timber themselves noticed the lack of a significant deterrent element in the basket.
“I realized certain times when they had no tire protector in the game, when Jaxson Hayes was not on the court,” said Jaden McDaniels of 6 -foot 9 inches, who scored 25 points and had four offensive rebounds in the victory. “I mean, if you are not on the court, I am basically the highest person.”
If you were more reliable when it was a positional defense and had better hands to catch those lings that Dončić likes to launch, JJ Redick could trust him for more than eight minutes. Obviously, at least in game 1, he did not.
However, those lost assists are where Lakers feel more size deficiencies. The Timberwolves accumulated almost double them, from 29 to 15. Of course, some of that was due to the atypical 3 -point shooting of Minnesota. They are not going to do half of their 3 again. But the Lakers didn’t shoot badly either. They made 15 triples in the game 1. They did it 31 times in the regular season and were 20-11 in those games. They were expelled on Saturday, and makes sense in the context of the list they have and the one they face.
The Lakers are built to overwhelm opponents with shots. Stop Dončić requires a ton of defensive resources. To commit to many makes it even more difficult to slow LeBron James and Austin Reaves. Having those three players should always mean being able to create advantages and find mismatches.
Dončić did almost without help with the Mavericks last year. Those big men were a large part of that. Containing it as a driver often meant turning a big man to meet him, thus moving him away from the lobe that he would ideally be protecting. Or Dončić receives an easy bucket or his center does. Without that center on the floor, Dončić becomes predictable.
Their passes, almost universally, go to 3 -point shooters. The Lakers have a creation of high -end shots, but the shooting in itself? Not especially imposing. They occupied the 19th in 3 -point attempts per game and 14 in a percentage of 3 points. He is not collapsing defenses in the same way without that dangerous center. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to force the defense of rotation, and give James and reeves their own opportunities to punish mismatches.
All this led to a 95 -point exit that only offers a plausible path towards victory. The Lakers no longer have Anthony Davis. They are not built to win feasts. Its objective is to use their star ball handlers to find and torture their weakest defenders. That will not be easy without a center to force those impossible elections. The Timberwolves had the sixth best defense in the NBA. They are relatively robust if they can continue with their base defense.
Are there resolved here? They are not obvious. James has been a great pick-And-Roll man in the past, especially for Kyrie Irving in Cleveland, but the Lakers have not perfected the dance of two men from Dončić-James even so much, and even if they had done it, James ends with force and trade. It does not have the capture radius that Gafford or Lively do it, and the specialty of Dončić is throwing passes only its huge centers can catch. Jarred Vanderbilt does not have enough hands to play that role.
None of this addresses Gobert’s problem. If the Lakers put a remotely unreliable shooter on the floor, the Timberwolves will simply put Gobert in that player to be free to play so much help on the edge on the edge he wants.
These are quite reparable problems with a low season. It can be as simple as “going to look for a center.” But for now, on Saturday it was a reminder of how hurried this team met. The Lakers did not plan to go to the playoffs in this way. The circumstances demanded it. Now Dončić faces the Timberwolves with a completely different type of cast that a year ago, and that will demand a completely different type of game plan to attack them.
Dončić and James are two of the smartest players in the history of the NBA. Reaves is not far away, and Redick was a creative adjuster in the regular season. If there is a solution here, you will find it. But whatever, it will probably have to be more conventional than last year’s approach to launch it to the high guy.
