Difficult season in Los Angeles. The 2020 ring has been left behind and the problems are already much more than an aging template. When the Angelenos added three consecutive victories for the first time all season, things got complicated: Anthony Davis injury and reappearance of the coronavirus. The first thing is not new, since we are talking with a very vulnerable man physically, but it will reduce the inner game of the squad for several weeks. The second, has gone from being a trivial problem a month ago to exploding in an extraordinary way in recent days, with a hundred NBA players involved in health and safety protocols, an expression that is being the daily bread in the last dates. Suddenly, things are like almost a year ago, the competition does not react thinking about the lucrative Christmas day and you cannot draw conclusions from games in which there are a huge number of casualties.
The Lakers have Russell Westbrook, Talen Horton-Tucker, Dwight Howard and Malik Monk out of the game due to coronavirus, as well as Anthony Davis with a knee injury. The inside game is gone for them: neither Howard nor Davis are available and DeAndre Jordan is a long way from being a reliable player. There is Jay Huff, a two way contract which he uses to also play in the G League with the South Bay Lakers. He measures 2.16 and is 24 years old, but little else is known about him and it does not seem that it will be the solution, although Frank Vogel will be forced to pull him in order for the situation to hold somehow.
Vogel himself has been questioned during these months, but Jeannie Buss already said that until all the players were available he was not going to make any hasty decisions. Yes indeed, that right now, between injuries and coronavirus, it seems like a chimera. Trevor Ariza and Kendrick Nunn have not even debuted, there was already a pivot missing from a squad that has practically been left without any and the situation is turning into disaster. And no longer because of the demerits of the Lakers, who have established the defense and have had the best version of LeBron in recent games. And also with a very good one from Westbrook, which has long since ceased to be the problem and was having a fantastic time before going into quarantine. Now, the catastrophe is beyond their control and they are all calamities that affect the group psychologically and leave the entity, from the board of directors to the last player, hand and foot tied.
From bad to worse
Now, the Lakers have a resurrected Isaiah Thomas and they play against the decimated Bulls (if there are no more cancellations) before heading to Los Angeles to play three straight home games. And now, regardless of the rival, the key will be the resilience and the ability of the board to complete the staff with 10-day contracts and the occasional readjustment. The market no longer matters, health matters: they have reported that Davis will be out for a month, four weeks, which is 13 games. But his knee is sore and the average recovery from these ailments is six weeks, which would be equivalent to 22 games offside and with no interiors in the rotation.
And Davis, who was already playing fairly regular (23.3 points on average, far from his best and greatly diminished in terms of the basic qualities that made him a key element of the 2022 ring), is not the only problem. It will be necessary to see how many more players enter the health and safety protocols and what are the restrictions that the NBA puts beyond doing more tests during the Christmas holidays. As the situation continues like this, Adam Silver is going to be forced to make more drastic decisions and, who knows, stop the competition for some time once the Christmas day has been saved. At the moment, everything is hypothesis while the pandemic continues its course and practically all the teams in the competition are affected by it.
The Lakers are sixth in the Western Conference, are 16-14 and are going light and dark, in keeping with the rest of a league in which almost no one was playing particularly well. Of course, the Lakers did not have everything lost either: They are the eighth best attack, in addition to occupying the sixth place in the competition in rebounding, the eleventh in assists, the sixth in steals and the fourth in blocks. Now, the pandemic is hitting Frank Vogel’s team hard, who have also seen injuries. And one thing is obvious: it is not the same as all this, if it returns to a normal situation later, it affects a young and vigorous team than the Lakers. Age can be a key factor, LeBron already suffered from last season’s condensed schedule and the roster has many veteran players. At the moment, and without news from Adam Silver, the Lakers have problems. And without Davis and with coronavirus, it may be LeBron’s turn to play a hero as long as he doesn’t fall prey to injuries or the pandemic. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done it. Some ray of hope will have to be between so much chamalidad. It is almost a matter of statistics.
