featured-image

Lakers Turn Up Competition With First Scrimmages

SANTA BARBARA — Each morning, the Lakers enter the team’s breakfast room and look at their “winner’s board,” which tracks the results of every drill and competition at training camp thus far.

Head coach Luke Walton is committed to crafting a competitive environment and this board — which chronicles the standing of every player, from top to bottom — is just another instance of that.

But no drill can replace the competitiveness that stems from old-fashioned scrimmaging, which the Lakers at last began on Tuesday night at UC Santa Barbara.

On Wednesday, Walton classified his team’s first scrimmage as “up-and-down” given the fatigue that comes with two-a-days and the amount of information that the coaching staff is instilling.

He said each player had his moment, especially Julius Randle, but that Marcelo Huertas was the one who impressed the most.

“He’s like having a coach out there,” Walton said. “We have so much new stuff going on and he’s constantly helping the other guys where they should be. He just understands how to play basketball, so he was getting guys wide-open shots the entire practice.

“He was competing on defense. But mainly the way he was running his team’s offense in the scrimmage was really impressive.”

While Huertas starred on offense, Walton also found himself admiring the defensive work of second-overall draft pick Brandon Ingram.

“Brandon’s defense was phenomenal last night,” Walton said. “He’s starting to really understand how to use his length in fighting over screens and contesting jump shots and making people miss. That was the most impressive part to his game last night.”

Walton says that he expects scrimmages to “get even more intense” considering that roughly 80 percent of the practices so far have been teaching as opposed to drilling.

But Ingram, for one, is OK with starting off by locking down the fundamentals.

“I’m just paying attention to what (Walton) says,” Ingram said. “The points of emphasis that he brings out each and every day. Even if we’re not going hard: just looking at the angles I should take, where I should be at the nail or anywhere else on the court.”

Ingram figures to join the likes of Randle, D’Angelo Russell and Jordan Clarkson in what has become known as the Lakers’ “young core.”

But 11-year veteran Lou Williams claims that the returning young guys recognize that they shouldn't use their age as a crutch.

“I think they understand that it’s time to go,” Williams said. “You really can’t hide behind the ‘young guy’ tag forever. There are a lot of young guys around the league making noise and they want to be a couple of those guys. The losing — you can’t really hide behind that for a very long time.”

Walton said that Russell, in particular, has been a vocal leader at camp thus far, while Williams — who can relate as a former prep-to-pro prospect — feels that the young Lakers are eager to join the conversation of contenders.

“These guys are hungry to have their own success stories now,” he said.