MIAMI – A 29-point loss in Minnesota on Monday. A 41-point loss in Miami on Wednesday.
Add it up, and it's the worst two-game stretch in Los Angeles Lakers history.
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The Lakers lost to the Heat 134-93 on Wednesday, that loss coming two days after a 109-80 loss to the Timberwolves. The 70-point margin is an all-time, two-game low for the Lakers; they were outscored by 67 over two separate two-game spans of the 2016-17 season.
“It sucks, for sure, to get your (butt) whooped like that twice in a row,” Lakers star LeBron James said. “For sure.”
The Lakers ran off a six-game winning streak last month to get to 10-4. They're 2-6 since, four of those losses coming by 25 or more points. Wednesday was the low point; the 41-point loss was not only the worst of the season, but it marked only the 11th time in Lakers history — more than 6,800 games, including playoffs — that they've lost by more than 40.
“I’m embarrassed,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said. “We’re all embarrassed.”
Redick is now 12-10 in Year 1 as a coach, and this stretch has obviously been his toughest yet. He oscillated in his postgame remarks Wednesday between pointing the finger at himself — “I’ll take all the ownership in the world. This is my team and I lead it," he said — and saying the team is having trouble with the simplest parts of the game plan.
“There’s not a sense from me that we’re ‘together’ right now," Redick said. “And that’s what we say in the huddle. Doesn’t feel that way. Doesn’t feel that way. We're in a tough stretch and we're all trying to find it.”
Miami outscored the Lakers 72-15 from 3-point range — that 57-point differential tying the fourth-largest in NBA history.
“We're having trouble right now on both ends with like base-level gameplan stuff,” Redick said. “It's odd. It's very odd.”
Anthony Davis had a season-low 12 points for the Lakers on Monday. He was four points worse on Wednesday on 3-for-14 shooting.
“Guys are doing their part. I’m not doing mine, which is just tough for our team," Davis said. “I just have to play better individually on both ends. I hold myself to a higher standard and I haven’t been doing what I needed to do — especially offensively for our team.”
James said he agreed with everything Redick said, and Davis even echoed a word his coach used multiple times.
“Embarrassing,” Davis said.
James hopes the rest of the Lakers' locker room takes on that level of accountability. He insisted that 22 years in the league have taught him not to get too high when things are good or too low when things are bad.
But back-to-back games like this represent something the likes of which he's never dealt with. The Lakers play at Atlanta on Friday, go home to face Portland on Sunday and then get a few days off — the NBA Cup quarterfinals on Dec. 10 and 11 are a built-in break for the teams that didn't advance to the knockout stage of that tournament — to practice and seek solutions.
“When you’re individually (messing) up and you’re trying to rely on everybody else to cover for you, I think it starts with the individual first," James said. "All of us have to take accountability.”
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