After Hawks and Jazz, I'm concerned some about defensive intensity and identity, particularly in the starting lineup. But there is no doubt in my mind Ime is gonna drill the guys hard and we'll see a big improvement in the two games next week. The 6-day gap until next Tuesday is a bummer of a wait, but it's probably a good thing. Two games to get their feet wet, a big gap to focus on practice and improvement before a final two-game tuneup.
Lakers get way too much respect for a team that’s underperformed and LeBron out. At least reasonable analysts acknowledge the age, injury potential and loss of DFS for example.
I wouldn’t be worried about the quality of our defense based on practice games. When it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose, you can’t really anticipate players would give high effort in defense. I personally more interested in seeing how our offense flows - ball movement, passes, taking good shots, chemistry between players in different lineups etc. Last year I remember that I wasn’t impressed at all by our offense. Thankfully, when the season started we shifted gear on defense which created more possessions, thus we were able to gain more points. But our ball movement and terrible shots accuracy didn’t improve feim what they were during the practice games. So overall I feel pretty good from the two games we had so far, due to our offense. I’m positive that once that 1) regular season starts and 2) when DFS comes back frim injury, our defense will be fine.
