Lakers Placing Focus on More Spacing, Buckets Down Low

The Lakes are looking to become more of an outside-in type of team this season, focusing on getting plenty of buckets near the basket, relayed Khobi Price of the Orange County Register.

And a lot of that will come down to proper spacing, coach Darvin Ham suggested.

“We have some high-IQ basketball players so we give them a kitchen full of surprises and sometimes we cook up the meals and sometimes they create their own spins on the dishes,” Ham said. “It’s been great. Just the dialogue and communication between the coaches and players, it’s allowing everybody to be more creative and get on the same page and be more consistent.”

Ham then emphasized the part about spacing.

“Our offense is a free-flowing offense and it’s predicated on space and quickness,” he said. “So whenever we cause the defense to be occupied, we have shooters out there. They have to account for people at the 3-point line, it opens up lanes and allows us to love and live in the paint. Which, in turn, puts that much more pressure on the defense to get stops and it opens us up to win the free throw line as well.”

Meanwhile, LeBron James said the Lakers won’t forget about life on the perimeter — it just won’t be the end-all, be-all.

“We have better shooting this year. We have a lot of guys that shot the ball extremely well from the 3-point line last year. (Taurean Prince), (Gabe Vincent) and obviously (Rui Hachimura) ended the year shooting extremely well. (D’Angelo Russell) shoots it, (Austin Reaves) shoots it, and myself and (Anthony Davis) we’ll sprinkle in as well,” James said.

“Obviously it starts with putting pressure on them and still getting to the free throw line, that starts with myself and AD. But when teams go under our pick-and-rolls or teams disrespect us from the perimeter we have enough shooting that we believe we can go up there and knock ’em down with confidence and with a high clip.

“But we know throughout the course of the game if there’s four, five, six possessions where you’re shooting jump shots and you’re not making them we gotta try to put some pressure on the rim, which we know we can do that as well. We understand that.”

Davis added it’s all about getting into a rhythm offensively.

“We talked about getting more threes up. Obviously it’s been a point of emphasis in the way the league has shifted too, just a lot of threes,” he said. “But it all came in rhythm you know, swing, swings or guys are going under pick-and-rolls or guys are shooting the gap in certain actions and things like that. We just wanna be confident in our shots and let it fly.”