No Excuse For Uneven Season, But Lakers Must Keep Believin’, Anthony Davis Says

Anthony Davis is ready for the Lakers to start being the team they say they could be.

Davis was speaking after the Lakers blew another one, this time to the surging Hawks on Sunday, to finish 2-4 on their longest trip of the season. Overall, the Lakers are 24-27 and in ninth place in the Western Conference.

So if the playoffs started today, they wouldn’t qualify. Instead, they would be in the play-in tournament (barely). This despite a complete makeover of the roster in the offseason, the addition of Russell Westbrook and a whole lot of high hopes.

“We just got to find ways to get over the hump,” Davis told reporters after Sunday’s loss. “There’s no excuse for us losing this game tonight obviously, but down the stretch, I think our execution has to be better on both ends of the ball.”

Aside from basic chemistry issues, one thing that continues to plague the Lakers is injuries to Davis and LeBron James. That keeps them from developing any sort of long stretch together, and with Westbrook and others — which is never a good thing when a team has so many new faces.

Missing your best players makes it extremely difficult for everyone to adapt when your best players do play. And James has missed three straight, all losses, with a sore knee. His immediate status remains unclear.

But as Davis indicated, this is a no-excuse business. On the bright side, he still seems to believe good things are possible when it means the most (assuming the Lakers get there).

“I still believe that we got a good team,” Davis said. “We just haven’t been all the way healthy with all our players. Bron is now out, I just came back. I think the most frustrating part is that we just can’t finish games. We had a lot of games that we had won and teams come back and beat us.

“So that’s the frustrating part, like we’re frustrated right now because we were supposed to win this game. It’s self-inflicted mistakes, so that’s the frustrating part because we can control those mistakes. … The little things, offensive rebounds, turnovers, you can control those things to give yourselves a chance to win the basketball game.

“We’re a good team, no matter what happens in the regular season, when we get to the playoffs, we’re a good team and I still believe that. When Bron comes back, we’re gonna be an even better team so like I said, we just got to stay the course and try to go into the All-Star break with a nice run and then take that break and come ready into the second half of the season rolling.”