After surviving a brutal December schedule, can the Lakers rebound in January and go on a run with a softer slate of games?
The last month of Lakers basketball has certainly been as big a roller coaster ride as imaginable. A lengthy road trip saw the team six of seven games away from home and featured them hitting rock bottom on the season with a blowout loss to the Heat.
That defeat in Miami, though, has become a turning point on the year as the team bounced back and ended the month winners of five of their last seven games, including the Christmas Day victory over the Warriors.
Prior to this stretch, I wrote about how tough it was going to be on the Lakers and how much it would test them. The mixture of travel, road games and level of competition made it likely the hardest portion of the team’s schedule.
They escaped it with a 7-7 record and a much better vibe to the team than they began it with. And because NBA schedules are cyclical, now the Lakers enter a month in which they could make big moves.
After playing 10 of their last 14 games on the road, the Lakers will leave Crypto.com Arena just three times over the upcoming 14 games. One of those “road trips” will be across town against the Clippers. From Jan. 9 through Jan. 23, the Lakers will not leave Los Angeles.
Predictably, it will rank as one of the easiest schedules in the league during that period. While the 14 games from Dec. 28 through Jan. 23 are right in the middle across the league, no team will have more home games than the Lakers’ 11.
On top of that, the three road games, two fewer than any other team in the league. They will have the rest advantage in three of those contests and will be at a rest disadvantage just once. In that span, they will have only one back-to-back in that span when they play Portland on Jan. 2 and Atlanta on Jan. 3.
The 3,202 miles the Lakers will travel in that span is the fewest in the league by over 1,000 miles. The entirety of those miles will come when they travel to Houston on Jan. 5 and then to Dallas on Jan. 7. That road trip to face the Mavericks also became a much easier contest with the recent news that Luka Doncic would be out for a significant time and will miss the contest.
On that topic, the Lakers' opponents in this span will be much easier than those they faced last month. Their strength of schedule over the upcoming month is the fourth-easiest in the NBA with an averaging win percentage of .434.
Cleveland and Boston on either side of this stretch will prove difficult tasks. Between those two games, though, will be six games against teams not currently in the playoffs.
To get even more micro, between those games against the Cavs and Celtics, the average win percentage of the Lakers schedule is .403.
It comes at a time when the Lakers have also set themselves up for success. After finishing December strong, a change from last season, the Lakers are sixth in the playoffs. The Western Conference is a tight race from second through 11th with only five games separating the 10 teams.
However, no one will have a better opportunity to move up over the next month than the Lakers.
Last season, the Lakers had a very similar opportunity at a very similar part of their schedule. They squandered that chance and then played catch-up for the season's stretch run just to make the play-in race.
With a strong January this year, the Lakers could move clear of the play-in, lock into a battle for home court in the playoffs and, perhaps most importantly, buy themselves wiggle room to close the season.
If the Lakers are a serious team — and the jury is definitely still out on that — then January could prove a launching pad for the remainder of the season.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.
