The Los Angeles Lakers suffered their first loss of the 2020 NBA Finals on Sunday night, losing 115-104 to the Miami Heat. The Lakers turned the ball over 19 times as the Heat took advantage of the team’s sloppy game. The Heat were also carried by an amazing performance from Jimmy Butler who ended with a 40-point triple-double.
Afterward, members of the Lakers had to identify the areas of the game in which they felt they lacked which led to the double-digit loss. Markieff Morris didn’t really pull any punches when talking about the film session that would be having today, saying that there were some team members who were not going to be having fun (reported by Dave McMenamin of ESPN).
Markieff Morris: “When we watch film tomorrow there’s a lot of people that are going to get their ass chewed out and we’ll respond better in Game 4”
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) October 5, 2020
Morris added the following, per Harrison Faigen of Silver Screen & Roll:
“All of us want to win at the end of the day. We all have been here for 80 days or something like that. We want to win bad. We didn’t show that tonight.”
You may think that no one can get more mad about 19 turnovers than you, the fan, but someone who might be even more angry about them than you is the head coach of the team. Frank Vogel was asked about the Lakers’ effort, an area that many blamed for the game three loss. Vogel didn’t necessarily see it that way, saying it was their execution that was more of a reason than the overall effort (per Mike Trudell of the Lakers and Spectrum SportsNet):
Frank Vogel thought it was more about execution than effort: “We have to execute as a group better."
— Mike Trudell (@LakersReporter) October 5, 2020
Kyle Kuzma also was discussing the execution side of things in regards to the 19 turnovers, accepting the blame for the team by saying it’s their job to limit those types of mistakes (quote transcribed by Ryan Ward of Clutch Points):
“You can’t be perfect. Can’t be the perfect human. Can’t be the perfect basketball player. You’re going to make mistakes, but it’s our job to limit those mistakes.”
Kuzma even felt like the Lakers had this game in the bag at one point, which is dubious, at best. Still, it shows the confidence the Lakers have that if they just limited their mistakes, they would have maybe won.
Kyle Kuzma: "That was our game and we let our foot off the gas."
— Bill Oram (@billoram) October 5, 2020
We’ll have to see how the Lakers are feeling after film and practice today. They have plenty of issues they need to figure out, but they cannot have another game of turnovers like the one they had in game three if they don’t want the Heat to make a comeback in this series.
