LA Lakers’ JJ Redick takes blame for team’s weakness

To see the Los Angeles Lakers’ offense digress the way it did during Sunday’s loss to the Celtics — despite their prolific individual offensive talent — shouldn’t have been a surprise. 

The Celtics poked at one of the Lakers’ tactical weaknesses that’s been evident for the last few months. 

And Lakers coach JJ Redick took ownership of his team underperforming in those situations.

The Celtics had multiple big men play in deep drop coverage against the Lakers’ pick and rolls, which stifled their offense just two days after it had one of its better performances of the season in Friday’s home win over the Clippers.

“When teams play the deep drop, we have our counters and we just got to [execute],” Redick said. “Sometimes when the ball’s just changing ends quick, it’s easy to just get into drag after drag after drag. So, I took ownership of that. We have our counters for deep drop. We got to do a better job of that.”

The Lakers did poorly against the Celtics. 

Too often, their offense would bog. 

Get stuck in a pattern of running set plays. Or not using the power of the pass to shift the defense, instead trying to rely on the individual offensive strengths of Luka Dončić, LeBron James or Austin Reaves to create advantages against a Celtics team that wasn’t allowing many.

The Lakers became predictable. And their struggles were, too.

The issues they faced were similar to the ones they had in their Dec. 1 home loss to the Suns, when they struggled offensively against a Phoenix team that had Mark Williams in a deep drop.

Or when they’ve gone up against the Victor Wembanyama-led Spurs.

“Our lowest potential assist games are all against the deep drop,” Redick said. “So I got to do a better job. 

The drop in potential assists is the result of a lack of ball movement — an issue that also isn’t new for the Lakers.

It’s one of the many reasons why their offense hasn’t sustained a level of excellence that’s expected with Dončić, James and Reaves at the helm. 

“It mostly depends on the team we play against,” Rui Hachimura responded when asked how the Lakers can have a consistently great offense. “There are some teams that play really good team defense. Against that, we have to be sharing the ball, trusting each other. We got to have ball movement. [Having] ball movement is going to be the key.”

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This Lakers team shouldn’t be expected to play like the “Beautiful Game” Spurs, which featured high-spaced ball movement and player movement.

Nor should they be expected to not allow their best players to freelance the offense from time to time.

But what should be expected is to consistently have better execution when defenses are in a drop.

As a prolific pull-up shooting team with high-caliber ball-handlers, they have the personnel to flip a tactical weakness into a strength. And they’ve shown they have the counters in their playbook, especially earlier in the season.

Now it’s about being consistent — which would be a new surprise within itself.