With the Lakers near the bottom of every statistical defensive category, JJ Redick wants players to care about how bad they’ve been on that side of the ball.
If there's one thing that's stood out from the Lakers' five-game road trip so far, it's how bad they've been defensively.
They could not even slightly interrupt Cavs players Donovan Mitchell and Evan Mobely's game. The pair combined for 49 points on 61% shooting en route to a 134-110 victory against the Lakers.
Then, on Monday night, the Pistons' backcourt dominated the Lakers with Jaden Ivey and Cade Cunningham lighting up their perimeter defenders. The game concluded in Los Angeles' most frustrating loss of this early season, a 115-103 defeat on the road.
The defeat was infuriating not only because the Pistons are projected to be a lottery team but also due to the poor defensive effort the Lakers gave at the start of the game.
In his postgame comments, head coach JJ Redick expressed his desire for a better overall defensive effort.
"I would say if there's one thing we just need to start with a little more just pride defensively. We talked this morning about this is a much different team than last year. They play really hard and they try to get up and down and they try to move you in the half court. I thought our effort and fight in the second half was really good. That third quarter, defensively, was, in some ways, a blueprint. It wasn't perfect, but in terms of effort, was really good."
In the third quarter, Los Angeles outscored Detroit by eight and held them to just 22% shooting from the field, so props to Redick for pointing the bright spots and places the Lakers can look at as positives in an otherwise negative game.
One of the biggest concerns for the Lakers has been the team's inability to stop others in transition. The Lakers are currently giving up 28.4 points in transition, the second-most in the NBA. The story is out on this team. If you can run, they won't/can't stop you.
"We just wasn't physical," Anthony Davis said postgame. "They were very physical when they were playing in transition, they had open looks from three. They made some shots early on. But they just didn't feel us early on either end of the floor. Even though we were making shots, our defense wasn't there from the start."
Currently, the Lakers still only have AD as a respectable rim protector and asking him again to clean up all mistakes down low while carrying so much offensive responsibility is a lot. Someone has to help him.
There aren't any bigs on the Lakers who can do this, so the best way to assist him is for the perimeter defenders to improve. AD is counting on D'Angelo Russell, Dalton Knecht, Austin Reaves, Max Christie, Gabe Vincent and Cam Reddish.
Yeah, that's tough.
But that's the roster the Lakers have. There are flaws and cracks in the defense, but it's one thing to get beat by better players, it's another to appear unbothered to give it a go.
We saw too much sleepwalking against the Pistons, costing them the game. This team is not good enough to play that poorly defensively, even against one of the younger, more inexperienced teams in the league.
They are still the Lakers and with a packed house and their only trip to Detroit, they should've expected the Pistons would give maximum effort and want to upset the big team when they came to town.
Now, it's time to take this loss and turn it into a lesson, to gain wisdom from this experience, and to turn it into wins moving forward.
You can follow Edwin on Twitter at @ECreates88.
