The Lakers were again buried under an avalanche of Cleveland Cavaliers three-pointers, the spacing and the gaps on the court pulling the Lakers’ defense to all corners before it eventually snapped under tension.
The result was the same, but the process and team the Cavaliers beat Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena in the final game of 2024 was fundamentally different from the one they blew out on Oct. 30 in Cleveland.
The version of the Lakers that got smoked in Cleveland was the one trying to get the most out of a formula that had already shown it had a ceiling, losing during the previous two postseasons to the Denver Nuggets. It was one that hoped a core of LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Austin Reaves and D’Angelo Russell paired with a new coach could find another gear, another level.
This week, the Lakers decided that vision wouldn’t end well. This week, the Lakers, at the very least, have fundamentally changed.
While the NBA’s best team at 29-4 swatted every Lakers push away, usually with some combination of backbreaking threes from Donovan Mitchell, Evan Mobley or reserve Max Strus, the Lakers showed glimpses of the ways they’ll be different moving forward. Better or worse remains to be seen.
Reaves, again seeing his volume spike with Russell now playing for the Brooklyn Nets, led the Lakers with 35 points and 10 assists, bouncing back from a bad first shift. Davis had 28 points and 13 rebounds. And James, playing for the first time since turning 40, scored 23.
But Cleveland took 11 more threes than the Lakers and made nine more. They scored 24 points off offensive rebounds to the Lakers’ 12. And, despite playing Monday in San Francisco, they set the tempo and physicality early as the Lakers quickly chased double digits.
Read more: Lakers acquire Dorian Finney-Smith by trading D’Angelo Russell to the Nets
Dorian Finney-Smith played 21 minutes in his Lakers debut, scoring on a putback dunk but coming up empty on his other three shots. Shake Milton, playing because guard Gabe Vincent missed Tuesday’s game with an oblique injury, hit a pair of threes in his 10 minutes, but the Lakers’ second unit without Russell was badly outscored 32-12.
Cleveland, looking very much like a fully-formed team as the calendar flips over to 2025, managed to have five players with at least 15 points led by 27 by Jarrett Allen.
“We certainly had our chances. And I really believe this against teams as good as Cleveland: You have to play close to perfect basketball,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said. “They’re not gonna let you beat them. They’re not gonna beat themselves.”
The way ahead for the Lakers seems like it’s going to have a lot to do with Reaves, the unquestioned backcourt leader and primary ball-handler in Redick’s offense. That shift, which looked fully realized for the first time in a Christmas win against the Warriors, got cemented with a 26-point, 16-assist game that helped the Lakers decide it was OK to trade Russell for Finney-Smith and Milton.
Tuesday, the decision got off to a pretty rough start, with Reaves turning the ball over three times in the first six minutes on offense and committing a pair of bad fouls on defense, the Cavaliers going up by s many as 15 in the first quarter.
“Are you saying I was bad in the first five minutes?” Reaves said in response to a question about his start. “[Because] yeah, I was. Great question. You make good plays, you make bad plays. Unfortunately, I came out and made some really bad plays.
“And I knew that, if we wanted to claw our way back into it and give ourselves an opportunity, then I had to be better.”
He was — he only had one more turnover and finished with 35 points, tying his career high. He also had 10 assists and nine rebounds.
“He’s gonna get a lot of opportunities to play on and off ball with actions on it in both ways,” Redick said. “There’s a nature to his game that you have to be willing to live with some of his stuff because of the way he attacks and the change of pace and the quick decisions and the quick bursts like there’s gonna be some of that and you have to live with that. It’s sort of the unforced stuff [where he] will grow.”
His teammates say they’re on board.
Read more: For Austin Reaves, making the winning shot for Lakers on Christmas holds special meaning
“What’d he have, 36 tonight? 35? … looked good to me,” Davis said. “He’s a hooper. I mean obviously he has a little bit more on his plate with ball handling responsibilities when Gabe is out and when LeBron is out of the game, but he’s used to it. He’s been in the league long enough now where he knows how to run the point guard position. So it’s going to be more reps. He’s ready for it, and we got the utmost confidence in him to run the point.”
The Lakers, an organization not built on moral victories, left the gym Tuesday knowing that a couple of open threes that that rattled in and out might’ve made a difference. There, were of course, other issues — namely on defense, where the Lakers were too often out of position and too late to challenge at the three-point line and at the rim. And they were certainly not good enough there to make up for the disadvantages their three-point volume and minor free-throw disparity (plus-two) created.
“Well, we just got to defend. I mean, obviously, we could shoot more threes, but our key to winning will be the defense. And [if] we’re not going to shoot more threes, than we have to defend, which we’ve been doing as of late,” Davis said. “I don’t think we need to jack more threes just to compete with other teams. If our defense is there, we’re running teams off the line, holding them into one shot. We did our job and now we go down and try to score.”
The Lakers think they have the blueprint to start winning games like Tuesday, to put themselves in the right positions by the end of the season. Of course, they’ve thought it before, too — and they just decided that version of the roster isn’t good enough.
These Lakers weren’t good enough either Tuesday. But, just like there is for Reaves, there’s time and room to grow.
“I think we’re trending in the right direction. Tonight was a good night for us. We just missed a ton of shots. Wide-open looks that we missed. We make half of those, it’s a different game. So, I like where our ball club is,” Davis said. “… I think we could definitely be better on both ends of the floor, but I’m not disappointed where we are right now.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
