Lakers Highlights: LeBron James, Anthony Davis Grind Out A Win Over Banged-Up Suns
Even without Devin Booker or Bradley Beal, the visiting Phoenix Suns played three really impressive quarters of basketball against your Los Angeles Lakers on Thursday night at Crypto.com Arena.
LA almost fumbled away its home opener in what should have been something of a gimme game, but big showings from its two immortals, LeBron James and Anthony Davis, helped the club hold on for a late victory.
Even in his 21st season, the on-court impact of LeBron James was acutely felt... especially during his absence!
The game, which also saw now-Phoenix Suns head coach Frank Vogel earn a video tribute for his championship-winning three-year run with Los Angeles, also marked the first non-preseason action between LeBron James and Kevin Durant since 2018.
No, seriously.
Los Angeles built up a 9-3 lead (off of a 7-0 start!), thanks mostly to Anthony Davis' five points and two rebounds. A lot of Davis' takes were facilitated by the Lakers backcourt, as here with this and-one scoop:
Then the Suns roundly outscored the Lakers the rest of the way in the quarter, 27-9. The Lakers shot a miserable 8-of-23 from the floor (34.8%), making just 1-of-9 triples, while the Suns connected on 12-of-26 shooting from the field (4-of-11 from long range). Phoenix also out-rebounded LA 18-11.
Undersized starting small forward Josh Okogie showed off how he could be this Phoenix team's Bruce Brown plenty throughout the game, but this relentless first quarter moxie serves as a good encapsulation:
Los Angeles starting forwards LeBron James and Taurean Prince combined to a shoot a miserable 0-of-5 from the field in the frame. Davis never scored again in the period after his initial burst. Suns guards Eric Gordon and Jordan Goodwin were Phoenix's high scorers in the frame, with each notching seven points (Gordon shot 3-of-6 from the floor and Goodwin made all three of his attempts).
Of course, the standout for Phoenix, when Booker sits, is always going to be Kevin Durant, whose size and shooting stroke remain completely unreal:
That 10-foot slice of Durant midrange mastery capped a brutal 16-2 Suns run to close out the period, with Phoenix on top after one, 30-18.
LA struggled to get much offense cooking when James sat, in an ominous sign of what would trouble the Lakers the rest of the night. The Suns managed to outmuscle Los Angeles to the tune of a 12-2 second-chance point edge, per Michael Corvo of ClutchPoints.
Christian Wood logged his first minutes of the contest at the top of the second quarter, joining Anthony Davis for a jumbo-sized frontcourt. LeBron James shifted to small forward to accommodate his addition. Conversely, Gabe Vincent helped shrink the backcourt by playing alongside D'Angelo Russell.
The Lakers turned things around with Durant sitting, outscoring Phoenix 20-5 while he was on the bench. An Anthony Davis three helped LA regain its first lead since midway through the opening quarter. An emphatic LeBron James dunk extended that advantage to three points.
Ex-LA head coach Frank Vogel promptly called for a timeout to re-group.
After Nurkic was whistled for three fouls through the first quarter-and-a-half of action, Vogel was compelled to lean on reserve Drew Eubanks to close out the period. The Suns quickly went on a 17-9 run with Durant back at the end of the second.
James, now on something of a Tim Duncan minutes plan, has looked positively mortal through these first two games. He couldn't buy a bucket in the first period, but scored 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting in the second.
Los Angeles also showed signs of promise with some of its new supporting pieces. To wit, check out this nifty little sequence -- Davis intercepts a KD pass intended for Okogie and outlets up the floor to a sprinting James, who dumps off a no-look bounce pass to a cutting Cam Reddish:
The Suns wrapped up the half leading 52-48.
Despite Phoenix missing two of its three best players, its bench stepped up and LA's depth failed to capitalize. Three Phoenix players headed into the break with double-digit scoring already. Durant led the way with 15 points on 5-of-11 shooting (and a very, very noticeable +19 plus-minus), plus five boards, five assists and one steal. Gordon (12 points on 5-of-12 shooting) and Goodwin (10 points on 4-of-7 shooting) also got in on the fun. Nurkic's eight boards paced the Suns' 30-25 advantage on the glass.
Davis and James each logged 11 points on 4-of-7 shooting from the floor.
Although Russell and Reaves were a bit passive, they did shoot well in the half. D-Lo had 10 points on 4-of-8 shooting, while Reaves notched four on 2-of-3 shooting. Gabe Vincent had another rough shooting start, notching just two points on a miserable 1-of-6 shooting. Prince was a dud, contributing no points.
Both clubs struggled mightily without their respectively top stars in the first half (sorry, AD, maybe you'll just never be ready). During the first two quarters, Los Angeles outscored Phoenix +12 with LeBron James in the game and was outscored -16 when he sat. In the same time span, the Suns conversely went +19 when Durant played, -15 as he rode the pine.
Things were fairly back-and-forth for much of the third quarter, often again hinging on the availabilities of Durant and James for their respective squads.
Eventually, however, Durant helped Phoenix pull away late, pushing the club on a 9-2 period-closing tear (he scored six straight points in that span). He notched his 13th, 14th and 15th points of the quarter (and 28th, 29th and 30th of the game) with this nifty step back trey the end of the frame:
The Suns led by double digits, 84-72, heading into the last quarter of regulation. Durant had by this point already collected 30 points on 58% field goal shooting, nine boards, and two dimes.
Phoenix's luck ran out in the fourth quarter, however, as everyone not named Kevin Durant forgot how to do much of anything. Los Angeles badly outscored Phoenix, 28-11, in the frame.
Darvin Ham didn't do himself a lot of favors rotationally, going back to a frankly weird lineup he had explored in the first half a bit in the fourth quarter: starters James, Davis and Russell, surrounded by two positional semi-redundancies in Wood and Vincent. Why not play an actual shooting guard next to Russell, or actually swap in Vincent for Russell and put in a two next to him? Wood kills them defensively, and Hachimura seems like a cleaner fit in the frontcourt.
That said, Nurkic was baited into fouls, and upon getting whistled for his fifth, his play forced Vogel to slot in Durant at center for some key moments down the stretch.
Midway through the fourth quarter, the game slowed down and got much more physical as both teams started playing defense, and everyone on the Suns continued to forget how to shoot.
James had a fairly erratic night on offense, which included two scoreless quarters (the first and the third), but he essentially waved off Ham and blew right past the recently established 28-30 minute cap on his services, playing every second of the fourth frame en route to a 35-minute night.
Lots of turnovers and terrible shooting, prompted in part by some swarming Lakers defense, doomed Phoenix in the fourth.
Things devolved into a somewhat retro LBJ-vs.-KD slugfest late, with both all-timers trading tough, clutch buckets after the two-minute warning:
LA eked out a win, 100-95, thanks to some clutch late-game buckets from James and a resilient double-double from AD, who bounced back in a big way following an inconsistent season opener in Denver Tuesday.
Davis for his part was a behemoth down low. In 39:15, he scored 30 points on 10-of-17 shooting from the floor and an excellent 9-of-10 shooting from the line, pulled down 13 rebounds, blocked three shots and stole the ball three times.
James, however, was the closer. With the game knotted up at 91-91, he bullied his way into the paint for layups on consecutive LA possessions (sandwiching a missed Durant three-point try), powering the team to a four-point advantage with 41 seconds remaining. Durant, who clearly trusted no one down the stretch (to be fair, Grayson Allen and, uh, Jordan Goodwin were playing) missed a tough fadeaway heave, after which Davis snagged the defensive rebound. Los Angeles then essentially forced the Suns to play the free throw game down the stretch.
LBJ finished the game with a near triple-double: 21 points on 7-of-14 shooting from the floor, nine assists and eight rebounds. He also stole the rock twice and blocked two shots, as well as finishing with a +22 plus-minus, a noisy stat perhaps but one still generally indicative of a player's on-court impact for his team (that is to say, the Lakers outscored the Suns by 22 points during the 35 minutes James graced the hardwood).
The Chosen One also had his All-Star teammate's back. Responding to TNT's Jared Greenberg about the criticism leveled at Davis following his second half disappearing act against the Nuggets, James was explicitly frank:
Another interesting LA note: head coach Darvin Ham closed with a lineup of Vincent (in for defense, since he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn all night), Reaves, James, Wood and Davis. It's fascinating to see how these rotations have been shaking out, as Ham seems open to riding the hot hand in the frontcourt to pair alongside James and Davis (it was Prince on Tuesday), and has toggled between Vincent and D-Lo late in games, as well as playing them together.
Wood, signed to the veteran's minimum this summer after spending his previous seven seasons with seven different franchises, seemed to be totally dialed-in defensively. He recorded six defensive rebounds in just the fourth quarter. He finished with 10 boards overall, and seven points, in 21:24, while also recording a game-best +23 plus-minus, and oftentimes drawing the single-toughest defensive assignment on the floor (we'll give you a hint: his name rhymes with Shpevin Shpurant). We've seen this story before, to be fair: he did this for a few games with the Dallas Mavericks early last season before more or less giving up on that end of the floor.
Durant, meanwhile, passed Hall of Fame Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon to have officially scored the 12th-most points in league regular season history. He finished with 39 points on 14-of-28 shooting, grabbed 11 rebounds of his own, logged two dimes, a steal and a block. He also turned the ball over eight times, given that he was functionally kind of playing all five positions at once for a very depleted Phoenix roster that, even when healthy, lacks a traditional point guard.
LA held massive advantages in points in the paint (60-36), fast break scoring (16-6), points off turnovers (29-22), and ball control (20-16 in turnovers). This helped offset a massive disparity in three-point efficacy. The Lakers went just 5-of-29 from deep (no one player made multiple treys), somehow way worse than Phoenix's also-bad 9-of-31 shooting from beyond the arc.
Although the Suns when healthy look like a handful, it was a little disconcerting that, in the friendly confines of Crypto.com Arena and without Booker or Beal, this was still an incredibly competitive game. Outside of Gordon, Goodwin and Okogie, no one else among the Suns' supporting cast scored more than six points. But Durant was so terrific that he singlehandedly kept Phoenix in the game much longer than it otherwise had any right to be. If he's vertical, the 35-year-old is going to be a problem come playoff time.
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