When I hear people questioning the chemistry in the Lakers team, I raise my eyebrow and go “What’s to question?”. Walk with me.
D’Angelo Russell is a pass-first point guard, simple, he can dish it to anybody on the court. Kobe off a screen in the corner? Dish it for a catch & shoot. Or have a classic Kobe ISO, whatever Kobe is feeling. Randle and Hibbert down in the paint? Dish it to them and let them do work.
Are you seeing any potential friction here? I don’t. And then we get to the main one which I will also quash. D’Angelo and Jordan Clarkson. We watched Clarkson last season do some pretty impressive scoring, I put scoring in bold because passing (D’Angelo) and scoring (Clarkson) are two different dimensions of basketball. So who’s saying they can’t play together?
“They seem to get along pretty well,” Lakers coach Byron Scott said after Friday’s practice at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Stan Sherriff center here.
“For both those guys, they want each other to do extremely well, and their chemistry is undeniable when you see them on the court and off the court.”
“His mentality is more [to] score,” Russell said. “I’m looking to pass, and he’s in a position to score most of the time.”
Said Clarkson: “We’re two totally different players. He’s an excellent passer and I’m real aggressive and it just kind of comes together.”
“We hang [out] a lot off the court,” Clarkson said, “so it kind of makes it easy on the court.”
“We just relate to each other,” Russell said. “He’s not one of those real serious vets that you can’t crack a smile around. He’s a young dude, second year, still learning, still growing. Me, the same way. I’m a goofy guy, he’s a goofy guy. So we kind of complement each other.”
There you go. Nothing to see here, Clarkson knows D’Angelo can be great for them, and that means he will have to become more of a scorer than a facilitator.
“Oh no, I have to settle for getting buckets.” said nobody ever.
