The Los Angeles Lakers are enduring one of the bleakest stretches of their early season, and Thursday's blowout loss to the Houston Rockets may have been the wakeup call head coach JJ Redick and his staff needed to make a change.
Redick came out of Saturday's infamous "uncomfortable" practice with enough evidence to seriously consider impactful rotational changes moving forward.
"In terms of lineups, our guys upstairs have told us 250 minutes is like the sort of target number for when lineup data starts to set and normalize," Redick told the media after Saturday's practice. "So you can look at a lineup (that has played) 11 minutes, 'Oh, look at this 11 minutes!' Yeah, we played small-ball for one game and they played well that game. You can't take a ton from that. But there's certainly trends that we're looking at and we've kind of made some decisions on about where we're gonna go."
Breaking down the lineups
Los Angeles' most-used lineup this season has been its starting lineup of Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves, Rui Hachimura, LeBron James and DeAndre Ayton, which has played seven games and 85 total minutes together. This lineup has also churned out the Lakers' worst plus-minus (-29).
Removing Reaves, who will be out at least four weeks with a calf strain, and inserting Marcus Smart (a fan-favorite to replace Hachimura should Redick make a change) makes for Los Angeles' second-worst lineup by plus-minus (-28).
Looking through the lineups, there are two common denominators -- Hachimura and James. James will never be benches, which leaves us with Hachimura. If there were ever a change to be made, it would be moving the sharpshooting forward to a bench role in place of more defensive reinforcements.
The Lakers take on the Sacramento Kings on Sunday.