Lakers’ key injuries are ill-timed, but LeBron James, JJ Redick have been here before

Last Thursday was a day to forget for the Los Angeles Lakers.

The franchise was coming off its first 15-win month since March 2000, when Shaquille O’Neal was in the lone MVP season of his Hall of Fame career. Luka Dončić played all but one game last month; Austin Reaves played every game. A visit to the defending-champion Oklahoma City Thunder was an opportunity to make the biggest statement yet.

Dončić’s regular season came to an end Friday with a grade 2 left hamstring strain in the third quarter of Thursday’s loss to the Thunder. But Saturday, the Lakers learned that Reaves’ regular season also was over due to a grade 2 soft tissue strain to his left oblique. Dončić and Reaves are the Lakers’ two leading scorers this season. On top of that, Dončić leads the entire NBA in scoring. And both players went out with season-threatening injuries in the same game.

The injuries made me think of Doc Rivers on a weekend when the Milwaukee Bucks coach was selected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Rivers had a difficult day on April 25, 2016, when he was coaching the LA Clippers and his two leading scorers, power forward Blake Griffin and point guard Chris Paul, both suffered serious injuries in the second half of Game 4 of a Western Conference first-round playoff series against the Portland Trail Blazers. Those Clippers held a 2-0 lead before losing Game 3 in Portland. Griffin then aggravated a previous left quadriceps injury in the fourth quarter of Game 4, and Paul fractured his right hand.

Lakers head coach JJ Redick was a player on that Clippers team. He was dealing with his own heel injury at the time.

Redick will be the first to admit: Now is not the time to overreact to the losses of the Lakers’ two best scorers. But even he acknowledged that simply getting through the month of April would be an accomplishment.

“Our mission hasn’t changed,” Redick said Saturday before he’d learned the results of Reaves’ MRI and after the Lakers practiced in preparation for Sunday’s matchup against the Dallas Mavericks. “We want to go get the three seed. We want to win the first-round series. I know Luka is going to do everything he can to get back on the court. We don’t know what this recovery timetable looks like. But our job, the rest of the guys and my staff, we’re going after the three seed, and we’re going to try to win a playoff series. We’ll see what happens.”

For the Lakers, there’s a lot that needs to be accounted for without Dončić and Reaves. Those two combined for roughly 31 percent of the team’s touches this season, per Second Spectrum. The Lakers are also still without Marcus Smart, who has missed two weeks with a right ankle injury. Redick announced the team will need to play through 41-year-old All-Star LeBron James, midseason trade acquisition Luke Kennard, former starting forward Rui Hachimura and starting center Deandre Ayton.

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“It went from a strategic tactical standpoint that we obviously were going to have to play a little bit differently,” Redick said Saturday. “There’s enough that we have in that we can play through LeBron, play through Luke, play through Rui, play through D.A.”

Rui Hachimura’s role for the Lakers could grow as the team finishes the regular season and prepares for postseason play. (Gary A. Vasquez / Imagn Images)

Sunday in Dallas will only be the second time James plays without Dončić or Reaves all season. The first time was in January, a 132-116 road loss to the Blazers. Afterwards, James took the rare step of posting a Bible verse to social media: Isaiah 41:10, which focuses on comfort and divine support.

“In Portland, the ball boy gave it to me after the game, and he said, ‘Jesus loves you,’” James said when I asked him about the verse. “When I looked at it, I read it, and it just spoke to me. So, I posted it. One, because the guy was grateful enough and gracious enough to give it to me. And also, just reading it, it’s good to know that the people that’s laid down and the words being so great … that was a pretty cool moment for me.”

James’ resolve has been tested before. He won a championship in Cleveland 10 years ago, but the year before that, James lost one of his high-scoring teammates in Kevin Love in the Eastern Conference quarterfinals with a severe shoulder injury. James also lost All-Star teammate Kyrie Irving in Game 1 of the 2015 NBA Finals to a knee injury.

This isn’t uncharted territory for James; though, it’s certainly not a comfortable place to revisit at this stage of his career.

“There’s no filling it,” James said of being without Dončić, in particular, on Saturday. “I mean, you got a guy who’s averaging (almost) 35, and eight (assists) and seven (rebounds), and doing the things that he’s doing. You don’t replace that or try to even fill that. I think it’s up to all of us, whoever’s in the lineup, to pick up our individual play and make plays together, figure out ways we can get stops, figure out ways we can get the ball moving from one side to the other side offensively. And then, keep the same keys— no turnovers, obviously. Limit teams’ fast-break points. Limit teams’ offensive rebounds. It’s a lot of keys that we still need to do in order for us to win.”

While James will step in as the primary playmaker, his help will come from players with specific skill sets. When Smart returns, he will absorb more touches. Kennard, an ace shooter, will be used as more of a playmaker, too. Ayton yearns for more interior touches, and he’ll be needed there with James’ touches set to increase. Hachimura, a proficient finisher in the paint, from midrange and from 3, will likely need to start again.

“I get more touches maybe, but that’s how the league is, you know,” Hachimura said Saturday. “Some days, there are some opportunities, (and) different opportunities every game. So, I’m always ready for it. … Five games left, this is going to be a really important stretch of our season. We’ve got to get all of these.”

Redick noted that the Lakers will likely expand the rotation from nine players to as many as 11. Ten years ago, Redick was teammates with Austin Rivers, who had to become a starter in the wake of Paul’s injury. Now, Redick coaches Bronny James, who was already seeing increased playing time following Smart’s injury. The younger James struggled with the ball pressure of Thunder guard Cason Wallace in a blowout loss Thursday, but Redick suggested that the whole team was to blame for those issues.

“I think he’s done a good job,” Redick said of Bronny. “I think it’s easy to point to Cason Wallace picking him up full court and being disruptive, but Cason Wallace does that against everybody. (He’s) top five in deflections, and he leads the league in steals. We didn’t do a good job of giving him an outlet or setting screens in the back court, and that was made explicitly clear prior to the game, but those things happen within a game, particularly in a game that kind of gets out of whack, and you’re down that amount.”

Injuries aren’t an excuse for poor performance, but to exceed lowered expectations, the roster and coaching staff must now lock in. The Lakers have a week to follow the lead of their best remaining player and their head coach toward finishing the regular season on a solution-oriented high note. And then, the Lakers will have another five days to prepare for a first-round series against the Houston Rockets, Minnesota Timberwolves or Denver Nuggets.

“It’s going to be a different game, obviously,” LeBron James said. “But our keys and our determination to win is still the same. We still have an opportunity to, I guess, get the three seed, I believe. So, we got to go out and win basketball games, and we’ve got some really good competition still.

“(Dallas) plays really extremely hard. … We know we got OKC (on Tuesday). We got Golden State (on Thursday), who’s still fighting. We got Phoenix (on Friday), who’s still fighting. It’s going to still be a little tough on us. You got to be ready for that.”