Lakers News: Anthony Davis Defends Darvin Ham's Controversial Decision Vs Kings
In their eventual 125-110 Wednesday night loss to the Sacramento Kings, the Lakers trailed by 24 at the end of the third quarter.
Normally, the losing team will throw in the white flag there, and this was especially true in the Lakers' situation given their age and the fact that they're already banged up.
It seemed as though that was going to be the case entering the fourth quarter, as head coach Darvin Ham had pulled LeBron, Anthony Davis, and D'Angelo Russell out of the game, putting the reserves in instead.
At the top of the fourh, however, Ham ended up putting those three back in, along with Austin Reaves, in the hopes of trying to get something going.
Ham received some flack for this given the limited probability of a comeback, but with the Lakers ultimately outscoring the Kings by 9 in the quarter and cutting the deficit to as little as 9 with 2 minutes to play, it's safe to say it wasn't the most outlandish idea.
Here's what AD had to say about it, per Helene Elliott of The Los Angeles Times:
“I don’t think it was out of reach, technically. You always give yourself the first four or five minutes to see what happens,” Davis said. “And we just continued to chop down the lead and then just kept chopping and chopping away.”
Davis is right, and I think keeping the starters out there for a few minutes just to see if they could get something going is valid, as the Lakers have a number of solid offensive players that can get hot at any given moment, headlined by Reaves and Russell, who are both good three-point shooters (Reaves is a career 36% shooter on 3.2 tries, Russell has connected on 36.2% of his 6.9 triple tries).
The Kings are also prone to go cold for minutes at a time, as their reliance on the three-point shot paired with their poor defense can cost them games, as it did in the postseason last year.
For all the criticism Ham receives, the decision to put the starters back in was fine – the issue however, is the fact that they were in a position where this was ever a conversation in the first place.
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