Lakers newsletter: Who’s ready to panic?

MINNEAPOLIS — Hey everyone and welcome back to The Times’ Lakers Newsletter, where we took Thanksgiving week off and no one noticed! I’ve been on the road with the Lakers in and out of cities like Phoenix, San Antonio, Salt Lake City and, now, Minneapolis with Miami Beach as this sort of beautiful reward. The cost for the sunny destination? One of the worst Lakers games I’ve ever seen.

As a general rule, I try to use this space as a place to explain things going on around the Lakers with a level of nuance, but hey, when your team scores only 80 points, let’s get frisky.

Sound the alarms and let’s panic

After his team’s worst offensive game since he joined the Lakers in 2018, LeBron James was asked how he’d assess the season now that the team had played more than a quarter of its games.

“Wouldn’t say I’ll take it,” he said of the Lakers’ 12-9 record. “I’ll never want to say that.”

But James pointed out some indisputable facts. Yes, the team has an entirely new coaching staff. Yes, the team is running new offensive and defensive systems. Yes, players are adjusting to new roles and new players are being integrated.

JJ Redick’s pregame assessment of the first quarter of the Lakers’ season as “uneven and inconsistent” is, honestly, probably to be expected.

So why do things feel so awful?

Well, part of that is recency bias. After scoring only 80 points in a lopsided loss at Minnesota — on a night when Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards scored only eight points — James called the offense “nasty.” Anthony Davis said it was “disgusting.”

And on the whole, the offense has been the thing that’s mostly worked for this team through 21 games.

The energy inside the Lakers’ locker room at the moment isn’t particularly good, and that too can be expected after losing five of seven games.

But let’s not ignore some obvious warning signs indicating that the Lakers could find themselves in some real trouble.

Sign No. 1: James

After the Lakers beat Utah on Sunday night in an ugly game while missing close to half of their regular rotation, James spoke about their deliberate style late in the game, when they put the ball in his hands and let him hunt a mismatch with Utah second-year guard Keyonte George.

James had shot five for 14 from the field in the fourth quarter, hardly the kind of efficiency Redick has preached, but with Austin Reaves, D’Angelo Russell and others unavailable, it was a necessary evil.

And James kind of liked it.

After the game, he said that style of play felt more “normal” to him than the pace, space and movement offense the Lakers want to run. James referenced a career-low usage rate (it’s actually his second lowest behind his rookie season) as one of the biggest reasons he’s needed to adjust.

If the Lakers are asking James to do less with the ball in his hands, it should have positive effects in other areas — fewer turnovers, better offensive efficiency, etc. Lately, it hasn’t.

James is down to 34.5% from three-point range after four straight games without a make from long range. The slump, in fact, started sooner than that — coinciding with the Lakers’ NBA Cup schedule. Since Nov. 15, James is shooting 21.8% from three. Maybe even more troubling, he’s averaging a career-high 4.2 turnovers per game.

James has said he wants to play all 82 games, but even Redick acknowledged that might not be in the best interest for him or the team after he lumbered his way through Monday’s loss.

It’s fair to wonder if James’ legs will allow him to play in the Lakers’ motion-based offense while still allowing him to be fully engaged on the defensive end. James will pass Kareem-Abdul Jabbar for the most minutes played in NBA history sometime this month; he’s 115 behind the Lakers legend.

And if the Lakers want to play a style that one of their best players doesn’t want to play — or can’t — well, that’s an issue.

Sign No. 2: The defense

Do you know what’s a bad sign for the Lakers? That the team has placed an increased emphasis on its awful defense over the last two weeks only to watch its offense crater.

The likelihood that the Lakers can be a good defensive team without it being something the coaches have to emphasize every night is not great. The team just doesn’t have the kind of necessary defensive firepower to naturally smother opponents the way, say, Orlando or Oklahoma City or (the sure-to-be Lakers kryptonite) Houston can.

After the loss to Minnesota, Dalton Knecht was asked about the offensive woes and wisely pointed to the team needing to get stops and get in transition. But here’s the thing: The Lakers have been getting stops over the last week, and they still can’t put the ball in the basket.

There have been encouraging signs — maybe the biggest being Rui Hachimura competing in a variety of matchups, including on Edwards, and consistent, confident defensive performances from Max Christie — but the issues are the issues.

The Lakers are small in the backcourt. They’re bad in transition, in part, because Davis and James often are way behind plays after they attack the basket. And they lack real physical punch — a problem so severe the Lakers have given French bulldozer Armel Traore a look in their last two games.

Sign No. 3: Their toughness

If there’s a common denominator in the teams that have given the Lakers the most trouble, it’s having physical perimeter defenders and big men not afraid to deliver some punishment around the rim.

Teams can overcome these deficiencies — they usually do it with shooting. But when they’re at their best, the Lakers tend to bully smaller, less-physical teams.

So if the Lakers aren’t physical enough to fight with the strongest and toughest, and that’s their biggest strength, well, that would limit the team’s ceiling.

Again, there have been gains in this area with the Lakers making it a priority, but it’s come at some cost on the offensive end. Most people who know the Lakers know they’re not the physically toughest. And, if we look at what’s happened in the last week or so, their mental toughness can be questioned.

They coughed up the game to Orlando because of missed free throws — certainly a mental lapse. They collapsed in the second half when things got tough against Denver, a sign that the Nuggets have a significant mental edge. They got blown out in Phoenix, failed to execute late against Oklahoma City and couldn’t stop from being overcome with frustration against Minnesota.

After the Lakers “stopped playing” in the second half against Denver, Redick wrote it off as an isolated moment. In a giant red flag Monday, Redick said maybe he was wrong.

“I said that that was an aberration. I said that to the group. I said that to you guys,” he told the media after losing to Minnesota. “It’s looking more and more like it’s not an aberration.”

Sign No. 4: No way out

So what is there to do?

Bad news for Lakers fans hungry for the team to act fast — the issues that always have existed for the Lakers and the trade market still exist for them on the trade market.

Prices this early in the season are high for any player who would make an obvious difference, and the Lakers don’t have the players or the draft picks to make an overpay. That was true last year; it’s true today.

The team’s needs — size, two-way players, shooting — also could be described as “a whole bunch of stuff,” which presents its own problems when it comes to cost-benefit analysis of putting assets into play.

If there’s hope, it comes from the fact that while everything written above is true, the Lakers still are above .500, still capable of beating almost anyone and still a team getting comfortable with new offensive and defensive identities.

There’s probably no easy fix, which would be real reason to panic if the Lakers were more than halfway through the season. But it’s still relatively early and maybe the answers can come from within — at least one or two of them.

Song of the Week

“Mahashmashana” by Father John Misty

Do you know what’s awesome? Side One, Track One songs like this off the new Father John Misty album, just an absolute epic of orchestral beauty. It takes real guts to ask a listener to spend nine minutes (!!!!!) on the first song of an album, but man is this a tone-setter. I love, love, love this record even if I understand the meaning of only like one out of every 10 lyrics. “The perfect lie can live forever; the truth don’t fare as well” is one I get and man, it’s a good one.

In case you missed it

Lakers lose to Minnesota in lowest-scoring game of the LeBron era in L.A.

LeBron James goes old school to lead Lakers past the Jazz

Lakers’ chance to advance in NBA Cup slim after bruising loss to the Thunder

Lakers’ lineup changes pay off with a convincing win over the Spurs

Another lackluster effort as Lakers lose to the Suns

Lakers look to ramp up defense with return to physical play

New season, same result: Lakers lose to Nuggets after third-quarter collapse

Lakers’ six-game winning streak ends in late collapse to Orlando Magic