Hey everyone and welcome to the Fa-la-la Lakers Newsletter, holiday edition. In honor of the season, I’ll be thinking about the Lakers solely in Claymation for the next week or so.
This week, we’re going to break things up a little bit — a couple of things I really want to hit as the Lakers get ready to enter a fairly favorable stretch of schedule.
Let’s start with something people really wanted to talk about on the social media sites — JJ Redick’s praise for Rui Hachimura.
First time ever
Hachimura walked away from his media scrum Wednesday after the Lakers practiced, laughing a little in disbelief.
He’s just spoken to the media for seven minutes or so, while answering multiple questions about his improved focus and performance on defense.
“First time in my career,” he said, the almost notoriously offensive-first player said with a sense of humor and self-awareness.
When the Lakers first traded for Hachimura almost three years ago, he was a high-volume scorer with limited defensive upside despite his physical tools. Even after he moved into the starting lineup for the Lakers, he was a player teams would target in switches — the kind of wing, in a perfect world, the Lakers would hide on easier defensive assignments.
But almost out of necessity this season, Hachimura has had to take on more dynamic players on the perimeter, even having multiple possessions against Anthony Edwards in the Lakers’ recent games with Minnesota.
“I can be in the right position. I can use my length,” he said. “And I think that’s the one thing that I’ve been working on with the coaches and I think that’s getting better,” he said.
The Lakers defense, as a whole, has been much better in the last handful of games. While they’re still ranked 24th in the league, they’re 15th over the last eight games. And over the last three, the Lakers, somehow, are tied for first in defensive efficiency.
Hachimura said Wednesday that defense has become his primary off-court focus, that his offense is sort of a known commodity as he’s worked himself into one of the Lakers’ best three-point shooters while also being able to score from the midrange and paint.
Scoring can get you drafted in the NBA. It can get you a decent raise. But if you don’t eventually do the other things, your time as a role player on a winning team will ultimately be short. And as you get older in the league, fewer and fewer teams will bite when it comes to a score-first player that can carry an entire offense.
That, Hachimura said, is a factor in this shift — that what Redick and the coaches have pitched him about a role isn’t just good for the Lakers. It’ll be good for Hachimura’s career.
And last week before the Lakers played in Minneapolis, Redick raised plenty of eyebrows online .
“He’s responded to every challenge we’ve given him. He’s been our most consistent player just in terms of what we’ve asked him to do and then going out and executing it,” Redick said. “He’s been a pleasure to coach. He’s been a pleasure to be around every day. And we really missed him when he was out. It’s interesting, defensively, even when you watch tape, even the stuff off the ball he does the right thing more often than not. He’s, to me, he’s just like more consistent in terms of what we’re asking a guy to do, in terms of his role, his responsibilities, our system, our schemes.
“Does it without a complaint. Like, he’s awesome to coach.”
Getting more out of players like Hachimura on the defensive end would go a long way for the Lakers as the season moves on, internal improvement within the roster the cleanest way for the Lakers to get better in a market where their trade options are limited because of financial and draft capital reasons.
And even hearing Hachimura talk about defense, well, that’s progress.
“When we watch a film with the coaches … most of them are about defense. And especially like with [Jarred Vanderbilt] out … I have to be the one that — big perimeter guard, I have to guard those — worry about the best players on the other team.”
For the first time in his career, that’s been the plan.
An All-Star rant
Anthony Davis stated the obvious — the new All-Star Game format, a multi-team tournament made up of four teams — is no good.
“I don’t really like it,” the likely All-Star said. “But we’ll see how it goes this year and we’ll see if they change that or not.”
The league officially announced the format change this week in a multi-point social media post, a huge problem because any All-Star Game worth anything only needs two points: We select the players; they entertain people by sorta trying.
The latter has been a real issue and by creating some stakes with a tournament, the league is hoping to fix that to a degree. It … won’t.
The All-Star Game might be beyond salvaging, though I’d argue the players involved have a responsibility to put on a good show on one of the few days where they have singular attention on their product.
Maybe we could get a Ryder Cup style thing, USA vs. the World. Maybe we could get young players vs. old players. Maybe we could do short guys vs. tall guys. Or a mixed game of WNBA and NBA stars.
They’re all short-term fixes, the only real fix is people caring. And if the players don’t think the game is worth their attention, why should the public?
Bah humbug.
Song of the Week
Remember when the guys on “SNL” covered this kick-ass rock song by the lead singer of the Strokes? You shouldn’t because that’s not how it went down. It actually happened in reverse, Casablancas covering the Jimmy Fallon/Horatio Sanz song. We need more good Christmas originals; fewer “All I Want For Christmas Is You” covers.
