The Los Angeles Lakers open their regular season Wednesday at Crypto.com Arena against the Golden State Warriors, a familiar in-state rival that gave them fits in two preseason meetings earlier this month.
Both exhibition games offered limited insight into what either team will look like when it counts. The Lakers were missing Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves and Walker Kessler for the first matchup on Oct. 6 in San Francisco. A week later in Las Vegas, Kessler made his preseason debut and Reaves scored a preseason-high 28 points, but the Warriors were playing without Draymond Green, Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis. Steph Curry logged only 23 minutes in that game, while Kessler and Reaves each played limited stretches as well.
“We’ll do a normal scout,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said of preparing for the opener. “There’s segments of the game where they’re playing their rotation guys, [we’re] playing our rotation guys, where you can look and glean some stuff from that. And we will. Obviously you look at how they have played historically and what they’ve been good at. So there’ll be a combination of the two.”
The Warriors remain a known quantity even as the franchise enters what Steve Kerr called a “fading dynasty” phase last December. Their post-split offensive actions and Curry’s historic three-point shooting still present real problems for opposing defenses, even if Golden State is no longer the juggernaut it once was.
One thing the Warriors do reliably is force turnovers. The Lakers felt that firsthand in both preseason games, including a 30-turnover performance in the second exhibition. Golden State has ranked in the top five in the league for defensive turnover percentage in each of the past two seasons, which makes ball security a clear point of emphasis for Los Angeles heading into the opener.
On the other side of the ball, the preseason also suggested the Lakers’ defense could be further along than expected.
“From early in September, and even kind of early training camp-ish, maybe before we played our first game, I thought we could potentially be like around an average defense,” Redick said. “Our standards for that have elevated, and we talked to the group about that. We have the chance to be a good defense. And there’s certain things that we really want to get better at from the preseason.”
Redick identified transition defense and defensive rebounding as specific weaknesses exposed during the preseason. “The areas of focus for us, transition defense, defensive rebounding, we weren’t good,” he said. “So if we get better at that, we’ll have a chance to be a pretty good defense, and that’s exciting.”
