LeBron James failed to score a point in the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the Western Conference first-round series between his Lakers and the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Wolves erased a 12-point third-quarter deficit and won the game by a single bucket; with the victory they pulled into a 3–1 series lead over the higher-seeded Lakers, who are now a loss away from elimination. Worse, perhaps, than James's failure to score was Los Angeles's difficulty even getting him opportunities: The NBA's all-time leading scorer—fresh off a regular season in which he averaged 24.4 points per game on an outrageous 64 percent true shooting—attempted just two field goals in the fourth quarter of the most important game of his team's season. This, in technical terms, just ain't right.
However much what I am about to assert may disrupt the furious self-abuse of Mavericks owner Patrick Dumont, only so much of LeBron's untimely Sunday spectatorship can be blamed on the Lakers' ultra-stagnant All-Luka Offense. The Lakers, and LeBron in particular, appeared to be physically exhausted. Head coach JJ Redick had switched up his lineup to start the second half, inserting Dorian Finney-Smith for center Jaxson Hayes. This makes Los Angeles's defense quicker and more switchy; it also spaces the floor better for Doncic, forces Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert to guard out on the perimeter, and gives Los Angeles the versatility and distributed floor skills to more effectively beat Minnesota's trapping defense. This also requires a redistribution of interior dirty work that tends to require a lot of LeBron, as Los Angeles's stoutest physical specimen; without a center on the floor, the Lakers simply cannot survive without LeBron jostling and crashing and boxing out like a full-time big man, to say nothing of the usual relentless help-and-recover shit that defines playoff basketball. This worked, at first: Los Angeles flew out to a double-digit lead, then successfully beat back a couple of mini-runs and maintained a healthy lead for most of the second half.
It worked maybe too well. Redick either lost confidence in his bench or bought a little too readily the heroic stoicism of his five on the floor: From halftime on, the Lakers made zero substitutions. Yes, sure, it is normal for NBA head coaches to pare down their rotations for the playoffs; yes, fine, the paring tends to become more severe the more dire the circumstances. Still, it is worth noting that the Lakers became the first team since at least 1998 to use only five players for an entire half of a playoff game, per the Elias Sports Bureau. There's using only your best and most reliable players, and then there's leaving a small five-out lineup to play 24 straight minutes of playoff-intensity basketball in a road arena. In a special category on an entirely different page is giving 104 total seconds of rest to the man who leads all players in the history of North American professional basketball in total career minutes, in the 74th game of his age-40 season. LeBron James is an extraordinary player and athlete, but nobody would've been too surprised if during crunch-time, one or both of his legs had fallen clean off.
I am but a humble blogger, but the exhaustion that sandbagged the Lakers in Game 4 was noted and exploited by the man who dragged the Timberwolves to victory. "I felt like they were gassed going down the stretch," said Anthony Edwards, after pumping in 16 of his game-high 43 points during the fourth quarter. "So just trying to keep my foot on the pedal and keep going."
Redick said after the game that this no-subs second half was unplanned. Things were simply working, and he had faith in his guys. "I asked them at the beginning of the fourth quarter and told them we had two extra timeouts," Redick explained, of his process. "'If you need a sub, let us know.' Those guys gave a lot." But there's an unintended throwing-your-cap-over-the-wall consequence to delaying substitutions while your team has a healthy lead: At a certain point, you forfeit the option to rest your guys at all. It is precisely when your team is headed for a crisis that you do not insert Jaxson Hayes into your lineup. Asking a cold and stiff Hayes, who'd played just four minutes of the first half, to spell the world's greatest basketball player and help hold off a furious Timberwolves run during crunch-time of a playoff game would not be very different from reaching for the phone during a four-alarm blaze and dialing up the pizza dude. This, of course, is why you use Hayes before shit begins hitting the fan.
I don't mean to imply that Redick committed coaching malpractice, only that he pushed a hell of a button, one that may indeed be cross-wired to the self-destruct mechanism. Sunday it very nearly worked, in the sense that the Timberwolves needed a genuinely heroic Edwards performance, a controversial and somewhat wack late replay review, and a missed but open Austin Reaves corner three-pointer to win in regulation. Anyway, Redick's gamble came with the approval of no less an authority on LeBron James's durability than James himself. "We got some really good looks," recounted James after the loss. "We had a couple opportunities. I don't think fatigue had anything to do with that. Just missing some point-blank shots, you know? We were getting into what we wanted to get into. We just weren't able to convert."
That's awfully gentle on the quality of the Lakers' play down the stretch. The All-Luka Offense—grinding, static, and often hateful to watch even when it is producing points at historic efficiency—really did stagnate to the point of inoperability. A weary Doncic appeared to lose his ability to beat Minnesota's energetic point-of-attack defenders, even after the slow and tedious teamwork required to engineer advantageous matchups. Doncic's supporting players, also dead on their feet, lost that little bit of quickness and agility needed to dart quickly into the areas left open by a blitzing defense, and to then punish the 4-on-3s exposed by well-timed passes behind a high trap. The team's vibes started to sour: A red and wheezing Doncic gestured angrily at Rui Hachimura for being late up the floor when Doncic needed a release valve, and an apoplectic Redick later flapped alarmingly at an off-screen Laker—possibly also Hachimura—for a similar tardiness. And the whole time, while the Lakers slowed down and the Timberwolves did not and the margin closed, Los Angeles never put the ball into LeBron's hands. The times when it fell there—via defensive rebound or swing pass or outlet—felt random and accidental, and James seemed pressed in most cases to swing it on or around or ahead to someone else.
The Lakers plainly needed a second playmaker to create some offense, to hurl himself at defenders, and to take and make some tough shots. They had on the floor the greatest player of them all, and instead the bulk of that secondary playmaking went to Austin damn Reaves. I for one cannot be convinced that this was not due at least in part to fatigue. James topped 60 games played just once in his first five campaigns in Los Angeles, but was over 70 last season and again in this one. Last season he topped 2,400 minutes played for the first time since his age-33 season, and he was back over that mark again in his age-40 season. It's appropriate to think of him as a superhuman athlete, but someone in charge has to remember at all times that he remains a finite resource. It was hard not to interpret Redick's refusal to give him some rest as a win-or-die maneuver. The Lakers are now on the brink: If they calculated that they needed all of LeBron in Game 4, shit, man. There's still at least one more to go.
There's a timeline in the multiverse where Edwards made one fewer of his audacious pull-up jumpers, or where Chris Finch didn't have a replay challenge left in his pocket inside the game's closing minutes, or where Reaves's good final look splashed home, and the Lakers went on to win Game 4, and woke up today tied in the series with the action headed back to Los Angeles. Still, I would advise even the bizarro Redick of that bizarro dimension not to go no-subs mode a second time. Desperate times famously call for desperate measures, but of the two panic buttons, at least the unthinkable Jaxson Hayes one has the benefit of preserving the team's best players to fight another day.
