Stay up to day with the latest news, updates, and press conferences from your Los Angeles Lakers.
One of their offensive actions that is hard to defend is a play they call “L”. They like to flow into this screen and roll in transition/early offense situations. In this action, the point brings the ball up either side and the two bigs offer simultaneous screens…
To read the full Scouting Report go to Lakers Courtside Connection.
We pulled some of the more interesting quotes from Saturday’s media sessions for the Lakers and Magic, with Game 2 approximately 24 hours away.
Here are highlights of what Phil Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, Stan Van Gundy, and Hedo Turkoglu had to say:
Lakers Head Coach Phil Jackson
Q. Have you been able to track why this team has played to well really since the fourth quarter of Game 5 against Denver? It seemed like the team started to turn around right then.
JACKSON: Yeah, I don’t want to put too much emphasis on past efforts. The last successful act you do, that’s kind of a statement we use or a motto we use. You have to regenerate that all the time. They have a good feel right now, and hopefully they can sustain that tomorrow.
Q. Can you talk about Andrew’s whole postseason that he’s gone through and the way he responded in Game 1, and kind of gave the team a lift to start off the game and what you expect from the rest of the series?
JACKSON: Andrew has had a year that’s been a repeat almost of last season, you know, started to play really well in the month of December, got himself a 40 point game in January, then had the accident again almost at the same time, an incident that created a possible loss of season. This year he’s more fortunate and he was able to come back off of his injury. Playing a handful of games at the end of the season I think was a benefit for him. You know, he didn’t fully get to rehab his knee, but he got as close as we can possibly get before he started playing. So that’s one of the things that we’re really concerned, that he fully rehabs after the season is over and he’s 100 percent. But he’s come back and played with a brace which has some limitation … He gave us a lift in the first quarter of the game the other day, and that’s what we want, that early inside presence out there in the ballgame, and the combination of Pau and Drew out there gave us that impact. Pau has been very good at looking for Andrew, feeding Andrew, getting the ball into him when he has an open spot and an opportunity, and I think that’s helped Andrew’s game a lot. He’s very animated, intensely focused, I think, on this match up between himself and Howard, almost too much so, to the point where he still has to help, he still has to stop penetration. But he really has it in his mind that he’s going to stay attached to him, keep his body off the rim or away from the rebounds.
Q. I wonder if you could compare the importance of limiting Dwight Howard’s offense versus limiting Hedo Turkoglu’s offense, which carries more importance?
JACKSON: When you figure out the leaders of this team without Nelson on the floor, you have to figure out that Turkoglu is the leader by his amount of assists that he has, the ability to create shots for a lot of his teammates by his penetration off the ball, with the ball, off screens. You know, his value to the team at the end of the game in critical situations. So we have great respect for that aspect. However, Howard is always that threat inside, which that’s a 60 percent conversion. He gets the ball inside, he’s going to shoot 60 percent. If he’s close enough, he can finish. He leads the league in dunks. Those things are devastating to defense because a lot of times it all ends up with a three point play attached to it, what we call the old fashioned way. So really you’ve got the best of both worlds in the first game, he was 1 for 6 and the three point shooters were limited to a few baskets. So we know that’s going to change, and we want to make sure that we stay with our emphasis to stop penetration, and that’s the big thing, stop interior passes if we can, stop penetration off the dribble because that’s going to erupt to three point shooting opportunities.
Q. How much does your size on Hedo impact him? Stan pointed to that yesterday as a big difference from what he faced in the last two rounds?
JACKSON: Well, West, the defender from Cleveland, he’s a 6′2″ defender, 6′3″ at most. Trevor is angular, tall, wing span. Then we have big guys coming to help with that size and length. It’s been noted this year that the size that we play with has some effect on teams as far as penetration and passing and dribbling and then making the passes. So we’ve tried to accentuate that.
Lakers Guard Kobe Bryant
Q. Sometimes a team and an individual can be in that proverbial zone, where they can do almost no wrong. Are you and your teammates in that zone right now?
BRYANT: I don’t know, I hope so. We’ve been playing pretty well. We’ve just got to stay focused, try to keep it going.
Q. In your mind what is the biggest misconception about yourself?
BRYANT: The way I am on the court is the way I am off the court. I’m completely different at home and outside of the Staples Center and here. I think my USA Olympic teammates were up for a pretty big shock, too, this summer. I’d probably say that.
Q. Not to imply that you’re anywhere near done, but how much longer do you want to play?
BRYANT: I don’t know. I mean, I just love the game so much still. I just feel like there’s still so much out there for me to improve on and work on. My body feels great. God willing, I stay healthy, I’ll just keep going.
Q. Has your game gotten better or started to deteriorate at all?
BRYANT: No, I feel like I’m a much better player right now than I was last year. I just feel like I’ve improved a lot. I think there was areas of my game that I needed to work on, and I worked on those, and I think I’m better because of it.
Continue reading ‘Saturday Finals Quote Montage’
Beat reporter and columnist Kevin Ding of the Orange County Register joined us at Friday’s media session to take a look at L.A.’s situation after a dominant Game 1 victory.
As always, listen below or check out Playoff Central for everything else you need to know about this series.
New desktop wallpaper celebrating Kobe Bryant’s 40-point Game 1. Go to the Lakers.com Wallpapers page to download the most appropriate size for your monitor. Thanks to Tyson Beck for the design.
Somewhere in L.A.’s Western Conference Semi-Final series against the Houston Rockets, two things happened to Andrew Bynum, one physical and one mental: He started to get closer to his pre-injury conditioning level just as a strategic light bulb flipped on in his head.
The 21-year-old center realized that if he committed fully to protecting the rim, rebounding and getting up and down the floor in defensive transition, the Lakers would be very hard to beat. Makes sense, right? His offense would come naturally, but couldn’t be his focus.
“I think after the Houston series everyone really realized, ‘Look this is what it is, what we need to do,’” he said after Friday’s practice. “We’re going to have to play defense. Everybody’s going to have to sacrifice offense, it will take care of itself, especially with us. We have a deep team and everybody (can) score, it’s going to come down to how many people we stop, how many stops we can get in a row.”
That mindset led to a generally productive - and underrated - series against Denver that doesn’t show up in the numbers, and culminated in the young center’s nine-point, nine-rebound performance in 22:23 of NBA Finals playing time that essentially canceled out Dwight Howard’s 12 points and 15 boards in 35 minutes.
“You have to limit his easy stuff,” said Bynum, who did exactly that as Howard mustered just one field goal on six attempts. “Make him make shots over the top of the defense, make him have to earn all of his buckets.”
Surely the Lakers would take a draw between Howard, the Defensive Player of the Year and All-NBA First Team member, and Bynum.
But rewind back a few weeks ago when Bynum struggled with unconventional matchups (Utah’s Paul Millsap, Houston’s Chuck Hayes or Carl Landry) while trying to come back from his knee injury that limited his minutes and made finding a rhythm seem more difficult than keeping his 7-foot head from hitting a door ledge. There was something besides time and increased conditioning that helped Bynum get his mind right: Watching film.
Earlier this week, Bynum told the Orange County Register’s Kevin Ding how he was planning on defending Howard (a sample: “You’ve got to keep him as far away from the basket as possible”), because he’d already started watching tape with his teammates and coaches, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. As such, Bynum felt pretty comfortable with what Howard was going to do in Game 1.
“It’s definitely rewarding when that happens, and (watching film) is all part of it,” he said. “That’s something the coaching staff came to empower myself about. Cap (Abdul-Jabbar) watched film with us, came and told us, ‘Look, this is what you’re going to have to do against this guy.’”
Bynum could see what Howard wanted to do on one hand, and on the other, observe how much better the Lakers were against the Nuggets and Rockets (games five and seven specifically) when he was most active defensively. The proof was right there in front of him. True to form, his defensive focus (not to mention his eight first quarter points) certainly worked against the Magic in Game 1 of the Finals, leaving Orlando searching for a way to deal not just with the length of Bynum in the paint, but of Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, who collectively give L.A. three long and skilled post players that Orlando simply didn’t have to face in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
“I think the matchups are for us a little bit more, having L.O. out there and Pau out there,” Bynum continued. “The same advantage that they had, I think they just lost it. They had that ridiculous advantage against Cleveland where Delonte West was playing (Hedo) Turkoglu and somebody else small was playing Rashard Lewis. So now it’s a little bit different. And we’re really running them off the three-point line, that’s a big difference too. They’re swinging it around searching for that three that they were getting wide open. I think we have to just keep doing that.”
Bynum gets it.
He understands what he needs to do, what L.A. needs to do. And that’s certainly not good news for the Magic.
To watch Bynum, Derek Fisher, Lamar Odom, Trevor Ariza and advance scout Rasheed Hazzard’s post-practice video, CLICK HERE.
In a storied career highlighted by three NBA championships, an MVP award and a plethora of scoring titles, All-Star berths and All-NBA teams, Kobe Bryant had accomplished more than most athletes could dream of before Game 1 of the 2009 Finals tipped off Thursday at STAPLES Center.
But with a masterful performance emphasized by a stat sheet that read 40 points, eight assists and eight rebounds on the league’s highest platform, Bryant took another step up the ladder of the game’s all-time greats.
“Kobe’s energy in the game carried (the win),” said Phil Jackson, who said he wasn’t at all surprised with Bryant’s dominance. “He plays big in big games.”
“When he gets it going, he’s one of the best players of all time,” added Lamar Odom. “There isn’t anything that he can’t do. We understand how bad he wants to win this championship, and we all want it.”
The feat was all the more impressive after a sluggish first quarter netted just six points and two assists on 3-of-9 shooting, but he went on a 30-point, six-assist, five-rebound rampage in the second and third quarters to put L.A. up by 22 heading into the fourth quarter.
“I just want it so bad, that’s all,” said Bryant. “You just put everything you can into the game, and your emotions fly out of you.”
At the same time, Bryant was very careful to emphasize that L.A. “hadn’t won nothing yet,” his eyes firmly locked on Sunday’s Game 2.
But after one quarter that found the Magic up 24-22, it wasn’t even close. Orlando had gotten to the Finals in part by playing stingy defense that conceded 43.3 percent from the field (3rd in the NBA) in the regular season … Yet they had anything but an answer for L.A.’s combination of skill and length as the Lakers got almost whatever they wanted on offense, producing a mammoth 56-22 edge in points in the paint.
“There was nothing I liked (about the performance),” said Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy. “Clearly after the first quarter, we were totally dominated at both ends of the floor and on the boards.”
Offensively, Orlando struggled to get anything resembling the easy looks it got in the Eastern Conference Finals against the less-lengthy Cavaliers, turning in a 29.9 shooting percentage punctuated by a combined 5-of-27 (18.5 percent) from Dwight Howard, Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis.
“Defensively I thought they were great today,” lamented Van Gundy. “We’re going to have to find a way to get the ball inside more efficiently and play out of that more efficiently.
To Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol much of the defensive credit should go, as their collective job on Howard not only limited the big center to 12 points (only two from the field) but allowed the Lakers’ perimeter players to stay with Orlando’s three-point gunners, who were able to hit just 8-of-23 shots. L.A.’s two seven footers also received ample help from Lamar Odom, who contributed a 14-rebound, 11-point double-double off the bench.
“I feel a lot better,” said Odom, who’d been hobbled late in the Houston and early in the Denver series with a bruised back. “I’m a lot more active. You know I want it, I’m just pushing myself, and it’s never enough.”
Odom, Bynum and Gasol helped L.A. boast a 55-41 edge on the glass, pushed in part by Orlando’s poor shooting, which was key because Orlando turned the ball over just eight times. Yet for the Lakers, the 25-point margin really meant nothing, particularly as the losing team is often the one that has the benefit of making adjustments heading into Game 2.
“I think the best thing we can do is just forget about it,” said Kobe Bryant. “This is a resilient Orlando Magic team and this is nothing to them.”
“There are two days between games, so it’s a chance for (Orlando) to regroup,” concluded Jackson. “I told these guys it doesn’t matter whether we win by 60 or 6, it’s just one win, we have to go out and perform on Sunday.”
Until then, some numbers:
3
Three pointers hit by the Lakers in a 25-point win
4
Lakers players that had at least eight rebounds, led by 14 from Lamar Odom in 32 minutes. Pau Gasol (8), Kobe Bryant (8) and Andrew Bynum (9) filled out the boarding foursome.
5
Game 1’s in Finals history with larger scoring margins than Thursday’s 25-pointer, the biggest since Chicago’s 33-point victory over Portland in 1992 (courtesy of ESPN stats).
14
Points scored off the bench by Mickael Pietrus, 11 of which were in the second half, to lead the Magic.
16
Straight series victories for L.A. when winning Game 1.
23
Minutes played by surprise-entry Jameer Nelson off the bench, in which he produced six points with four assists and two rebounds on 3-of-9 shooting. Nelson finished -19 on the game, while starting point guard Rafer Alston was just -6 despite struggling from the field (2-of-9).
32
Second half points for the Magic, compared to 47 for the Lakers.
34
Shots taken by Bryant, more than what he took in Games 5 and 6 combined against the Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals. He seemed to figure out how Orlando was playing him after the first quarter, and took particular advantage of the pick and roll, which Stan Van Gundy lamented after the game. As for Kobe: “They were giving me a jumper,” he said.
46.1
Shooting percentage for an efficient Lakers attack, helped by the on-target Luke Walton (4-of-5, nine points) and Derek Fisher (4-of-6, nine points).
64
Rebounds that reserve forward Josh Powell would have finished with were he to play all 48 minutes, as he grabbed four in only three minutes of play.
Read about the Lakers vs. Magic Game 1 as it unfolds. As always, feel free to refresh your browser for live updates throughout the game … On second thought, I guess they wouldn’t technically be “live” updates since you have to press refresh. But whatever.
Inactives
Lakers: Adam Morrison, Sun Yue
Magic: Tyronn Lue, Jeremy Richardson
Starters
Lakers: Derek Fisher, Kobe Bryant, Trevor Ariza, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum
Magic: Rafer Alston, Courtney Lee, Hedo Turkoglu, Rashard Lewis and Dwight Howard
Stan Van Gundy Pregame
The big news out of the pregame interviews was that Jameer Nelson will dress and will “probably” play according to SVG, a surprise as it was reported earlier on Thursday that he likely would NOT play. Here’s the quote: “We’re going to dress him today and probably play him. Some ways not a difficult decision because it just comes down to trying to make a decision that we think gives us the best chance to win. The easiest decision would have been to not play him … He would have understood and it wouldn’t have disrupted our rotation. He’s ready to go, we think he can put some pressure on their defense.” The plan is to put Nelson in off the bench when Rafer Alston takes a seat. Van Gundy said the Magic will stick with him regardless of how well or poorly he plays.
Phil Jackson Pregame
On Nelson’s impact: “We haven’t discussed it by name, but by position. The players with specific talents, we discuss them … Rafer filled in and was almost identical to what they (had with Nelson).” So, essentially, the Lakers aren’t thinking too much about it. Jackson also addressed the nervous energy that leads into Game 1 of the NBA Finals when asked how his younger role players might respond, but did not seem at all concerned with it. He feels that L.A. is ready to play, though of course several adjustments will be made after Game 1. Basically the same stuff we’ve heard all week.
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First Quarter
12:00 The game ball was presented by a guy named Earvin Johnson, who was led “Magic” by Lawrence Tanter. The assembled crowd appreciated that (apparently he was pretty good at basketball).
11:24 After Howard’s miss, a deep catch in the lane by Bynum immediately produced a personal foul on Lewis. After the inbounds pass, Gasol found Bynum with a pretty pass just under the rim, resulting in a dunk and the first points of the Finals.
10:54 Much has been said about Orlando’s three-point shooting ability, which Turkoglu showcased in the corner after Alston’s penetration. While Bynum answered with an elbow jumper, Alston drove right past Fisher for a layup. Gasol then lost the ball on offense, and Howard scored his first points to put Orlando up 7-4.
7:56 Worried about foul trouble, Howard barely contested another Bynum hoop, as ‘Drew’s six points gave L.A. a 10-9 lead.
5:30 The first time out came after Bynum drew Howard’s first personal on an isolation play from the left block, the score tied at 14 with two free throws coming. Both teams shot well in the first six minutes, combining for 13-of-25 (52 percent), primarily from the inside, as Turkoglu’s was the only 3-pointer attempted.
3:30 L.A.’s defense was happy to allow deep jumpers from sub Tony Battie, while Fisher and Gasol sunk theirs to put the Lakers up 20-16 as Bynum’s second foul so Odom check in.
2:36 Walton checked in for Ariza and immediately got a dunk for Gasol (you wonder why players love playing with Walton) who then drew Howard’s second foul on the other end. Meanwhile, Mickael Pietrus had checked in to guard Bryant, and Marcin Gortat in for Howard.
0:45.2 Orlando took the lead on an Alston layup after Bryant missed for the fifth time in eight attempts.
0:01.0 Another Bryant miss wouldn’t quite climb over the rim at the buzzer, allowing Orlando the 24-22 lead after the first quarter of the Finals.
Continue reading ‘Lakers - Magic Running Diary 1′
The big news out of the pregame interviews was that Jameer Nelson will dress and will “probably” play according to Magic head coach Stan Van Gundy, a surprise as it was reported earlier on Thursday that he likely would NOT play.
Here’s Van Gundy’s quote:
We’re going to dress him today and probably play him. Some ways not a difficult decision because it just comes down to trying to make a decision that we think gives us the best chance to win. The easiest decision would have been to not play him … He would have understood and it wouldn’t have disrupted our rotation. He’s ready to go, we think he can put some pressure on their defense.”
The plan is to put Nelson in off the bench when starter Rafer Alston takes a seat. Van Gundy said the Magic will stick with him regardless of how well or poorly he plays.
FROM LAKERS.com
