Lakers News: Expert Proposes Drastic Game 3 Starter Changes For Los Angeles
Your Los Angeles Lakers head into tonight's pretty much must-win Game 3 of their Western Conference Finals series against the Denver Nuggets trailing 2-0. But LA may still have at least a few hands left to play that could get the club back into this series, if one expert is to be believed.
On the latest episode of his essential hoops podcast The Lowe Post, ESPN's Zach Lowe spoke with colleague Ohm Youngmisuk about a critical adjustment Darvin Ham could make to his first five, even after he already shook up his starting lineup ahead of Game 2. The Lakers started a guard-heavy lineup comprising D'Angelo Russell, Dennis Schröder, Austin Reaves, LeBron James and Anthony Davis in Game 1, got quickly trounced in the first quarter, and found themselves playing catchup for much of the contest. Ham swapped in power forward Jarred Vanderbilt for Schröder in Game 2.
LA admittedly played better overall on Thursday than it did on Tuesday thanks in part to being able to stock up on more size to combat a big Denver team, but Lowe seemed convinced the team could have done more.
"So if I'm the Lakers, I don't think I'm starting Vando [Jarred Vanderbilt] again," Lowe offered. "I understand why they're doing it. You put him on [Jamal] Murray, you can switch the Murray-[Nikola] Jokic pick-and-roll -- which I think Denver can run more of and should run more of. Vando gets into his air space in a way that the Lakers guards could not do in Game 1. [During that game] he got way too many easy, 'just let me stroll into this' long twos in Game 1. The Nuggets also very smartly realized, if Vando is on Jamal Murray, we've got to run him through a whole bunch of stuff, through a maze of picks, 'cause he's a big guy, he's not going to be able to pick up."
"I think the lineup that they have to ride or die with in this series is Schröder, Reaves, [Rui] Hachimura, LeBron, Davis. I think that's their best lineup in this series," Lowe continued. "I might just go ahead and start it, hurt feelings be damned. That lineup is +15 in 15 minutes in this series, +28 in 35 minutes in the playoffs, and [in that lineup] I get the size with the Rui/LeBron/Davis trio, and I think size is a big part of why the AD roaming thing works. It's not just AD, it's that they're just big all around. There's a bunch of arms in the paint."
"And I can either put Rui on Jamal Murray and do the same kind of switching thing [as LA has done with Vanderbilt], or if that's not working -- and I don't know if that'll work over a long course of time -- you put Dennis Schröder back in that alignment, and you put Rui on Jokic, Davis on [Aaron] Gordon and LeBron on Michael Porter Jr.," Lowe proposed. "I don't love D-Lo in this matchup. That lineup [I established] to me just works, and I might just go ahead and start it if I were the Lakers."
It's a fascinating proposal. Yours truly suggested starting Schröder over Russell after the Game 2 loss, when it became apparent that Russell's defensive issues and inconsistent shooting were making him something of an exploitable liability for LA to leave on the floor for long stretches. Hachimura is not quite the same level of defender Vanderbilt is, but his scoring has made him overall a much more valuable player for the Lakers during the playoffs, and his athleticism at least allows him to hold his own on defense.
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