SO MUCH WAS happening behind the scenes on Feb. 1 — when the Los Angeles Lakers‘ stunning trade for Luka Doncic was being consummated — that it was easy to miss what actually happened in the game that night.
The Lakers had defeated the Knicks 128-112 at Madison Square Garden behind a stout defensive effort without their best defensive player, Anthony Davis. The box score offered clues at how they’d done it: Knicks stars Jalen Brunson (16 points on 7-for-18 shooting) and Karl-Anthony Towns (17 on 3-for-12 shooting) had off nights, while role players such as Josh Hart (26 on 11-for-16 shooting) picked up the slack.
The next game, a 122-97 win over the Clippers, offered more evidence. James Harden shot 2-for-12 with just seven points. Kawhi Leonard went 4-for-11 for 11 points. Then came a 120-112 win over the Warriors in which Stephen Curry finished with 37 but was an atrocious 6-for-20 from behind the 3-point arc.
It was over the next four weeks, during a stretch in which the Lakers won 13 of 15 games and rocketed up the Western Conference standings, that coaches and scouts around the league began to examine that win over the Knicks for clues as to what the Lakers had been doing. They’d gone from the league’s 20th best defense over the first three months of the season to first.
How did a team without its best defensive players hold Brunson and Towns to a combined 30% shooting? What about Harden and Leonard? Curry? Were these just bad nights? Or had the Lakers, with traditionally small lineups, concocted some sort of nontraditional scheme that could stifle the NBA’s biggest stars?
ESPN analyst Kendrick Perkins posited that L.A. was simply conceding the 3-point shot and daring teams to shoot themselves out of games. Others pointed to the defensive play of Dorian Finney-Smith and Gabe Vincent. One scout told ESPN, simply, “I think they’re just playing really hard.”
No one was wrong. But no one had come up with an explanation that fully captured why the Lakers were shutting teams down without their two best defenders.
And, perhaps most importantly, no one knew, either, if what the Lakers were doing would work when it matters most: with an NBA championship on the line.
IT WAS AROUND this time that former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski sent a text to his former player, first-year Lakers head coach JJ Redick, to check on him. Krzyzewski had always watched NBA games, but he’d been paying especially close attention to the Lakers this season.
“I reached out to him and said, ‘Who the hell would’ve predicted you could teach defense?'” Krzyzewski joked.
Redick won a player of the year award at Duke, but early in his NBA career, defense, or his lack thereof, had kept the sharpshooting Redick off the floor at times. Eventually he improved enough to play meaningful minutes for the Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers and New Orleans Pelicans.
“What they’re doing seems very simple,” Krzyzewski told ESPN, “but it’s actually a lot of preparation. They make it where the other team’s lower-percentage shooters are taking more shots.”
It might sound simple: Make it hard for the other team’s best players to score while encouraging less dangerous shooters. But the Lakers’ scheme is far more complicated than that, and it was born out of offseason analysis by Redick and his staff on how NBA defenses are allowed to play by referees against modern space-and-shoot NBA offenses.
Even with a brilliant individual defender such as Davis, who is as good of a rim protector as there is in the league, it’s virtually impossible to slow down the modern NBA superstar in pick-and-roll actions in space because of how much 3-point shooting is emphasized.
Most teams focus on acquiring perimeter defenders to at least slow down superstars before they meet a back-line defender like Davis. But with the way referees call hand-checking fouls now, even that is difficult.
The Lakers came into the season with another problem: two weak one-on-one perimeter defenders as their starting guards in D’Angelo Russell and Austin Reaves. So they developed a defensive scheme to mitigate that vulnerability — and save Davis from an exhausting amount of work as a backline defender.
The Lakers, the thinking went, would create the illusion of a crowded floor for the ball handler rather than funnel everyone to Davis.
It worked in spurts during the first half of the season. But the Lakers’ defensive scheme stiffened once L.A. traded for Finney-Smith in late December and he became a bigger part of the rotation a few weeks later.
Star players are always going to find ways to score. What the Lakers do is use analytics to break down the least efficient shots each star player takes and then try to force them into taking those shots, as opposed to their most efficient shots.
The Lakers limit shots in the paint — just 39.9% of the shots attempted against them have come from inside, the NBA’s third-lowest rate, per GeniusIQ, an AI-powered sports analytics site — and force 3s; 49% of the shots they face come from deep, the NBA’s second-highest mark.
Consider that first Knicks game: The Lakers swarmed Brunson and Towns, forcing them to pass to less dangerous offensive players such as Hart, Miles McBride and Precious Achiuwa. Brunson and Towns were contested by an average of 1.37 players per shot attempt, the third most they faced in a game this season, per GeniusIQ. By contrast, Hart and McBride faced 0.92 per attempt, the seventh-lowest mark in a game in which they combined for 20 or more shot attempts.
And whoever is defending the less dangerous players will aggressively help on the more dangerous one, often leaving their player completely open, like Vincent did on a play with 9:53 remaining in the fourth quarter, when he left McBride to clog a passing lane to Brunson, who was already being denied by Max Christie.
This is intentional. The Lakers send a double-team inside the arc at the second-highest rate in basketball, trailing only the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the aforementioned play in the Garden, McBride picked up his dribble near the top of the 3-point arc, realized the Lakers had completely left him alone and decided to shoot. He air-balled.
The ball fell right into the waiting hands of James, who plays what Redick describes as a “quarterback” role in the scheme.
REDICK PLACED JAMES at the center of this decision-making tree, relying on his basketball IQ to call out coverages and adjustments on the fly. “Quarterback is an offensive position, but he’s the quarterback on [our] defense,” Redick said. “A lot of that is his voice and his IQ.”
Watch the Lakers closely on defense, and James is the director, constantly pointing to where his teammates need to go — and when.
“There’s was a play in the first half where [Reaves] switched onto a big,” Redick noted after a recent win over the Rockets. “Within half a second, Bron was screaming at him, ‘Scram! Get Out, AR! Get out of here!’ Plays like that really connect our defense.”
The Lakers have struggled when James isn’t on the court, playing that quarterback role. They fell off noticeably when James sustained a left groin strain during a March 8 game vs. the Boston Celtics. But they got back in sync once James returned from that injury March 22. From Jan. 30 until the end of the regular season, L.A. ranked sixth in 3-point field goal percentage allowed. It also defended the eighth-most 3-point attempts per game during that span.
In other words, the Lakers gave up a lot of 3-point attempts, but teams didn’t make very many of them. According to GeniusIQ, opponents have shot 36.8% on wide-open 3-pointers against the Lakers since Jan. 30, the third-best rate “allowed” over that stretch.
Why? Because the Lakers are forcing the least efficient shooters on opposing teams to take those 3s.
How? By communicating until they lose their voices — sometimes literally.
James leads the chorus when he’s out there, but Jarred Vanderbilt, Finney-Smith and Vincent also step into that role when James isn’t on the court. There’s also constant direction coming from the sideline during defensive possessions. Assistant coach Greg St. Jean is often hoarse from barking out coverages.
The result has been a defense that has performed much better as a whole than its individual defenders might suggest. “People might look at us and say we’re going small,” Reaves told ESPN of the Lakers’ often centerless lineups without a traditional rim protector following the trade of Davis to the Mavericks. “But we also have five guys that are 6-foot-7 and above out there … and when we’re playing well, we’re all on a string.”
At times, that can look like a zone defense as the Lakers pack the paint and rotate to close off gaps and passing lanes. But it’s not a zone. It’s a blend of modern analytics and old-school, Bobby Knight-style denial of whoever is one pass away from a good shot.
The goal is to play the percentages. To disrupt what the other team wants to do as much as possible. To force great players to take bad or average shots. But also to cajole average players to shoot more by giving up good shots.
It takes time and trust in the scheme to play this way effectively. When that trust fails, so does the defense. Sometimes spectacularly. But it’s the best chance the Lakers have after trading away two of their best defensive players.
And in the first round against Anthony Edwards, one of the NBA’s most dynamic scorers — and shooters — and the Minnesota Timberwolves, a team with lineups that can go either big or small, the Lakers’ defense is about to be tested once again.