Lakers News: Frank Vogel Doesn’t Hold Back on Aspects the Team Needs to Improve On
The Lakers got the win last night against a young Cleveland Cavaliers team, but it wasn’t a great performance by any means. During his postgame press conference, coach Frank Vogel was quick to point out several points of emphasis of needing to get better for the team.
The team turned it over a whooping 10 times in the first quarter, and 15 by halftime. They definitely cleaned up that aspect of the ball, as they only had five turnovers in the second half.
“We’re still trying to figure out what it takes to execute great ball security. It’s not all on the ball handler. When we not spacing appropriately, and we’re screening poorly—we had to call a couple timeouts to clean up and fix—the ball handler is going to get put in a bad position.”
The spacing to start the game was atrocious to say the least. It’s not entirely on the players, as a starting lineup of Russell Westbrook, Kent Bazemore, LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and DeAndre Jordan, is not by no means a lineup, opponents are thinking as three-point threats. We are only a handful of games into this young season, so it’s not too surprising that the players have not figured out their teammates’ tendencies yet.
The game was too close for comfort up until the fourth quarter, when the Lakers finally held the Cavaliers to 16 points. Vogel talks about the adjustments the team made in the fourth quarter defensively that helped put the game away.
“We got our bigs up on some great ball handlers, when it was [Colin] Sexton or [Darius] Garland, and when we were able to foul less, that’s where we gained some traction. I been wanting our guys to protect the damn rim, way better that we’ve been doing. Was very disappointed in the first half, and we continued on the theme and we got some great rim collisions in the fourth quarter finally, and it’s something we can build on.”
When asked about the on-court chemistry between Westbrook and James, Vogel was quick to point out how they have always been vibrant from the start. He went back to how the team needed to improve defensively to create more of those opportunities.
“The open court chemistry has been there since day one. When I was talking to you guys about how good they’ve looked in practice, those on the court situations have been really dynamic, really exciting to be apart of, and we’re seeing that tonight. The sequence you alluded to, we just have to defend to create those, we gotta play without fouling to create those open court situations. We haven’t done that enough, but we’re working very hard on it."
Everything Vogel says is on point in terms of what they need to do to take the next step to compete against contending teams. Right now, a lot of their defenders are subpar, but Vogel has a track record of turning subpar individual defensively players, into elite team defenses, that rank in the top tier of the league.
