Yet following that tournament win, the Lakers have struggled. They’ve openly griped about being road weary, about a schedule that has kept them living out of suitcases since Thanksgiving, about back-to-back games and time-zone switches that have pushed the days together into unrecognizable blobs.
The Lakers needed a break. That wasn’t going to come.
So instead, they settled for a jolt.
Anthony Davis, following the Lakers’ fourth straight loss, called Saturday’s game with the Thunder a must win. Darvin Ham, the team’s coach, followed suit with a starting lineup change.
And LeBron James retook his throne as the best player on the court , leading the Lakers to their best win of the season, 129-120 against the Western Conference’s second-best team.
James scored 40 points, hitting huge shot after huge shot in the fourth quarter, when he had 15 points, as the Thunder sprinted to try to erase a Lakers lead that was as large as 26 late in the third.
It was the 75th time in the regular season James scored at least 40.
Said James: “To know I can go out and still make game-winning plays and affect the game in multiple ways, and I can still close out a game in the fourth quarter when my team needed it, when they started making a run, it’s always a good feeling, for sure.”
The Lakers’ dished out a season-best 38 assists, James taking over as the point guard in the lineup switch. He was one of three players with seven assists — Cam Reddish and Anthony Davis did as well — with Austin Reaves leading the team with nine off the bench.
“The only ways you can get assists are if your teammates are making shots — so everyone was making shots,” James said. “When everyone was passing the ball, we were trying to keep it on time, on target and not turn the ball over. And that was the key to it.”
After failing to straddle the lines between offensive and defensive lineups in the first two months of the NBA season, Ham decided on a lineup change that would clearly define his team.
He put point guard D’Angelo Russell on the bench in favor of forward Jarred Vanderbilt, a move that would force the Lakers to lean into a defensive identity.
“And when you play great defense, it makes the offense a little bit easier,” Ham said before the game. “And so just wanted to lean into that side of the ball. Start out a little bit bigger. Obviously we’ve been struggling in a lot of first quarters this season so we feel like being a little bit bigger on the perimeter, more athletic gives us a chance to really have this go in our favor this time.”
The switch would rob the Lakers of things they were already light on — shooting and playmaking — while swapping that out for more size and versatility on defense.
It also added punch to their bench.
Russell’s first shot, a step-back three-pointer, was an airball. But from there he made four straight shots — a triple, a floater over Thunder 7-footer Chet Holmgren, an and-one in transition and another three. He finished with 15 points in 17 minutes off the bench.
“The result was a win. For me, that’s all that matters,” Russell said.
The shakeup in the starting lineup wasn’t the only change the Lakers faced.
Guard Gabe Vincent, the team’s biggest acquisition this offseason, could soon undergo a knee surgery that would sideline him for the next six to eight weeks, sources confirmed to The Times.
Vincent, who sat out 24 games because of swelling in his left knee, returned to the court Wednesday in Chicago. After playing 14 incident-free minutes against the Bulls, swelling returned to the knee, forcing Vincent to consider surgery.
A decision should come shortly.
In the meantime, the end goal on the court, Ham said, was to see the Lakers play this way on a consistent basis — to bring this effort and energy when the stakes aren’t as high.
“We have to get to the point where we can initiate, sustain and finish based on what we want Laker basketball to look like,” Ham said afterward. “Not just if we’re playing for something or it’s something at stake or whatever. It can’t just be about that. It has to be about how we want to present ourselves to the world, present ourselves to these other 29 teams that we’re going up against in a fashion that can be tough, competitive, together, consistent.”
Getting up for the next game shouldn’t be an issue as it comes Christmas Day at home against the Boston Celtics.
“We’ve been kind of struggling after the in-season tournament. The schedule, the travel, all of that,” Rui Hachimura said. “But we talked about it after the game, the last game in Minnesota, and said the next game has to be must win. AD said it.
“We were so locked in this morning in [the] shootaround. … We’ve got to keep doing it. We just got to get into a rhythm and the next one’s big too, the Christmas game against the Celtics. We’ve just got to go out there again like we just did and try to get into rhythm.”