The Los Angeles Lakers suffered an embarrassing lost to the New Orleans Pelicans on Sunday night.
After being up by double digits for much of the night, the Lakers allowed the Pelicans to come back in the game and steal the win, 116-108.
With the loss, the Lakers’ postseason has been put at even greater risk. With the loss, they relinquished the No. 9 seed to the Pelicans and are now holding onto the No. 10 seed by a thread.
The No. 10 seed is the final seed that will advance to the play-in tournament this season. If the Lakers fall to the No. 11 seed, there will be no postseason for the team.
After Sunday’s lost, Lakers superstar LeBron James issued some questionable comments about his teammates.
“It was a playoff-type atmosphere, playoff implications, things of that nature,” James began. “I knew that from the jump. We also got a lot of guys on our ball club that haven’t played in playoff games as well, and plays a lot of big minutes for us.
“You have Malik [Monk], Wenyen [Gabriel], Austin [Reeves], Stan (Stanley Johnson). And you know Talen [Horton-Tucker] is pretty much not accustomed to it as well. We’re trying to bottle that in and help the young guys understand the magnitude of it, and they’ve got guys who’ve been in the postseason.”
James has been known to make somewhat questionable comments about teammates in the past, and this certainly seems like an offhanded criticism to some degree. However, it’s not as though James is fully blaming his teammates for the loss.
Instead, it appears as though he is simply acknowledging that they are young and inexperienced. That isn’t their fault at all, and James knows that.
Still, a loss is a loss. The Lakers are running out of time to turn their season around. If they fail to make the playoffs, the 2021-22 season will likely go down as one of the most disappointing in James’ illustrious career.
