“Do You Believe That We Can Win That Fight Tomorrow Night?”
Can Atlanta make it 3-for-3 for the week in SoCal? The Hawks will aim for the Peach State Trifecta when they kick off their Staples Center sleepover in a tilt with the Los Angeles Lakers (9:30 PM Eastern).
The notion of rebuilding from the ground floor is usually fun, at the outset. As fans, though, you just have to be careful when it comes to understanding what risks you’re signing up for.
Having moved on from Kobemania in the search for the next great Laker Legend, Lakerfans have swayed from Randlemania to D’Angelomania to Ingramania to Lonzomania. Each year, fans have sold on their own self-made hype, that the next lotto pick is The Next Great One, certainly enough to carry their hallowed franchise to playoff glory for the first time since 2013.
But now, the Lakers sit at 11-27, on the verge of losing their tenth in a row and 13th in 14 games. And if they don’t play their cards right, their next lottery hopeful may be suiting up in Celtics Green instead.
Despite raw shooting skills (35.2 FG%, 30.3 3FG%, 48.0 FT%), Lonzo Ball (6.8 RPG, 7.0 APG, 1.4 SPG) is nowhere near bust material. In fact, the rookie’s rebounding, passing wizardry, and defensive skills from his point guard position are almost ideally what the Lakers need. But when it comes to the long haul of rebuilding teams, and the instability that can transpire from the floor to the front office along the way, draft scouts may now have to weigh the merits of a prospect’s progenitors.
As one might say, you can’t choose your draft pick’s parents. “You can see they’re not playing for Luke [Walton, the Lakers’ head coach] no more,” says proud papa LaVar Ball, chilling at a Lithuanian spa, trying to keep Lonzo’s younger siblings from starting another global incident. LaVar treats the second-year full-time NBA coach the way he treated his kids’ coaches from high school and AAU through UCLA, with disdain.
“Luke doesn’t have control of the team no more. They don’t want to play for him,” LaVar adds, each critique moving Tito Horford further up the ballot for the Pro Baller Discretionary Dads’ Hall of Fame. “I can see it. No high-fives when they come out of the game. People don’t know why they’re in the game. He’s too young… He ain’t connecting with them no more. You can look at every player. He’s not connecting with not one player.”
LaVar won’t be happy until he is controlling his kids’ teams, from the sideline, and if they’re still not winning, he won’t be satisfied until he has run his kids’ teammates out of town on a rail, something that may literally happen soon with the younger clan over in Prienai-Birštonas. In cahoots with media that can’t seem to tear the microphones away from him, LaVar’s mouth forces everyone, from Laker management to Lonzo himself, to drop everything and, on a Sunday night between the worst two clubs in the NBA, formally address the dissension that the Big Bawler of the Ball family tries to stir.
If he’s not overly distracted, Lonzo (who, naturally, disagrees with his father regarding Walton) has the tools to make his head-to-head tonight with the Hawks’ Dennis Schröder (last 2 games: 38.7 FG%, 4.5 APG, 4.5 TO/game) an arduous one for the latter, especially if former UGA star Kentavious Caldwell-Pope can switch onto Atlanta's top scorer. For all the Lakers’ offensive faults (NBA-low 32.4 3FG%, 68.9 FT%), thanks largely to Lonzo, they push the pace (NBA-high 103.8 possessions per-48) and they’re the best NBA team aside from Golden State (16.1 per-36) in producing fastbreak points (11.7 per-36).
The Hawks can counter by pounding the only team with interior defense (NBA-high 10.7 opponent second-chance points per 48) as sketchy as their own (10.6 opp. second-chance points per-48). Los Angeles allows a league-high 37.2 paint points per-48, and that was with Andrew Bogut, who was waived this weekend. Brook Lopez, aside from his 1.5 BPG) and super-rookie Kyle Kuzma (team-high 17.2 PPG) provide next-to-no defensive resistance.
If Horford-in-Training rookie John Collins (58.8 2FG%, 9th in NBA; 15.0 O-Reb%, 4th in NBA) is unable to drown the Lake Show with a dominant interior offensive performance, might his family harbor grave reservations about the strategic wisdom of Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer? Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, we’ll never know.
Go Dawgs! Rise Up! And Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3
