Home Sports LeBron says Lakers must play near-perfect to win: ‘That’s the way our team is constructed’

LeBron says Lakers must play near-perfect to win: ‘That’s the way our team is constructed’

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Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James, right, attempts to pass Los Angeles Clippers guard Amir Coffey.

Lakers forward LeBron James, right, controls the ball in front of Clippers guard Amir Coffey during the Lakers’ 116-102 loss on Sunday at the Intuit Dome. (Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press)

JJ RedickOn multiple occasions this season, he has spoken about his belief in being process-oriented. It’s a necessary tool for any athlete, and especially one who made his fortune in the NBA as a shooter and missed more three-pointers than he made. Redick has said that if he knew he was doing the right job, he could be at peace with the outcome after the ball left his hand.

He reiterated it before the Lakers played on Clippers on Sundayand after his lopsided defeat 116-102 At the Intuit Dome, he mentioned it again.

“Every time we made a mistake they made us pay. But our guys competed. We fight. “We stayed together,” the Lakers coach said after the loss. “This is for us, this was a good process for us. “We didn’t get the result we wanted.”

Read more: Clippers show Lakers everything they are not in first rivalry game at Intuit Dome

But that message does not resonate within a locker room that had been frustrated by the Lakers’ inconsistencies, with LeBron James saying that the team’s roster construction is the reason for their narrow margin of error.

When asked if there were ways for the Lakers to increase those margins, internally, James was direct.

“No,” he said. “That’s how our team is built. We have no margin for error, much error.”

In a follow-up session, James was asked if the Lakers had to play near-perfect basketball most nights to win. And again, James basically said the team’s flaws demanded it.

“We have no choice,” James said. “I mean… that’s how our team is built. And we have to do it, we have to play almost perfect basketball.”

James’ comments could perhaps have been dismissed as frustration after the Lakers lost for the fourth time in their last six games, but Redick was also realistic about the team’s chances every time he plays. When asked about a stretch of the schedule in which the Lakers were in Los Angeles for 10 of 12 games (the Lakers are currently 5-5 during it), it was hard to tell if he was being optimistic or fatalistic.

“You can certainly look at a schedule and say this is an easier part of the schedule or this is a more difficult part. Nothing is going to be easy for our team. And I realized that very early in the season,” Redick said before changing his tune. “And that’s fine. Let’s keep fighting. … We have 18 losses, so according to the loss column, we are sixth. We would like to be higher. I think there are a couple of games where we would all say we should have won. We haven’t had any of those games where you say, ‘Well, we stole that one.’ At some point we’ll get a couple back. “We just have to keep trusting each other and we will be fine.”

The numbers, Redick said, are the numbers. Despite being 22-18, the Lakers have a negative point differential, and not a particularly close one. At -2.6 points, only Utah, New Orleans and Portland have been worse.

“We don’t have a big margin for error. We also can’t create that margin organically,” Redick said. “You have to emphasize touching the paint daily, playing with the mentality of painting big, making the extra pass. We don’t have a player on our team that necessarily always brings two to the ball. We don’t have a player on our team that can outplay his guy one-on-one and get to the paint and extend it to the perimeter.

“That’s just not our team. So we have to do it through connectivity, through execution. And when we do that, we are really good.”

And when the Lakers don’t?

They end up in the same frame of mind as Sunday night, asking the big questions that have kept them, in the words of one veteran NBA scout who watched the Lakers this week, “stuck.”

Read more: Kawhi Leonard is closer to being a game changer than he once was for the Clippers

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This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.

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