The time when the Los Angeles Lakers were the young, upstart team surprising the rest of the league with their unexpectedly good defense seems long gone. The days of Lonzo Ball and Brandon Ingram offering tantalizing visions of the next era of Lakers basketball under head coach Luke Walton but a distant memory.
Replacing those memories has been the Lakers’ most-recent stretch, in which the team has lost three games in a row and eight of their last 10 following a 117-110 defeat at the hands of the Utah Jazz that was never as competitive as the final score would indicate.