Gabe Vincent is 6-1. He is a very good defender against players in his general size-range, but there is only so much he can do against players substantially taller than he is. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t want to leave him alone on the floor against, say, a 7-foot future Hall of Famer who can score from everywhere. That isn’t a problem against most opponents because frankly, very few such players exist. The Phoenix Suns happen to have one in Kevin Durant.
In the final minutes of the first loss of JJ Redick’s coaching career on Monday, that was the difference. With the score tied at 101 and a bit more than three minutes on the clock, Durant landed on a very basic and very successful strategy: hunt the small guy.
That’s about as basic a switch-hunt as you’ll ever see. Durant is guarded by Rui Hachimura. Bradley Beal, who is guarded by Vincent, comes up and screens. The Lakers are forced to switch. Durant sinks a jumper over the smaller defender. One possession later, it’s much the same, and while Durant needs to score in traffic, he adds two more to Phoenix’s tally.
Even when the approach didn’t lead directly to points, it created advantages that ultimately generated them. Durant once again found Vincent, and even though he swung the ball and Devin Booker missed the shot, the Suns got the offensive rebound, and with everyone out of position, Royce O’Neale scored on an easy floater.
That last bucket gave Phoenix the three-point lead it ultimately needed to win the game, and Redick took responsibility after the game.
“If there’s one thing to nitpick, it’s probably me,” Redick said, noting that he could have blitzed Durant earlier in the fourth quarter. He could have, but let’s not pretend that was a perfect option. There wasn’t one given the tools he had at his disposal.
Blitzing against Phoenix is an enormously risky approach. The Suns have three star perimeter players, last year’s 3-point percentage leader and a bevy of role players more than capable of knocking down open looks. They are not a team you want to hand 4-on-3’s to. In a perfect world, you want to be able to defend them straight up.
The question, then, is who Redick could have done that with. Max Christie, a 6-5 wing, was supposed to be that player for the Lakers, but he has struggled enormously thus far this season. The Lakers have lost his minutes in all four of their games this season by 55 combined points. Even after two years on the bench, he’s still too raw for high-leverage minutes, especially on offense.
Jarred Vanderbilt is the best perimeter defender on the Laker roster, but he’s injured. Even if he weren’t, well, he’s not even on raw on offense. He’s just bad. As the Lakers discovered in the 2023 Western Conference finals against Denver, trusting him in big moments is tantamount to playing 4-on-5 offensively.
D’Angelo Russell might’ve made this easy if he’d made his shots. While he’s no match for Durant, he’s at least bigger than Vincent and would have opened the door for the Lakers to win on offense instead of defense. Instead, he shot 2-of-9 from 3 and missed his last two attempts, both wide open in the fourth quarter, badly. Redick couldn’t trust him to close the game, especially when he’d put the offense in the hands of Austin Reaves.
Dalton Knecht is an offense-first rookie. Jaxson Hayes is a center, and while he’s more mobile than most big men, the Lakers weren’t going to close big against a Suns team with so much perimeter firepower. And now, we’ve covered the entire rotation.
This is the problem Redick ran up against down the stretch in Phoenix, and it’s the one he’s going to keep dealing with as the season progresses. The Lakers have four generally reliable players: LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Hachimura and Reaves. Barring injury or extreme in-game variance, they are going to be closing most Laker games and can broadly be relied upon to execute on both ends of the floor. But basketball teams use five players at a time, not four, and as we’ve covered, every other player on the team shares some significant flaw.
On Monday, Redick decided that Vincent’s flaw — his size — was the lesser of all of these evils. That decision may have cost the Lakers the game, and from that perspective, he was right to take some measure of blame for the defeat. But there wasn’t a good option available to him either, and as reductive as it is to boil every Lakers season down to the trade market, there’s really no other fix available to the Lakers here.
Redick has the Lakers outperforming the talent they have, but that talent comes with a defined ceiling. Monday night, that ceiling was exactly as tall as Durant. If the Lakers want to break through that ceiling, they are going to have to give Redick the tools to do it.
