EL SEGUNDO — Russell Westbrook and Anthony Davis emerged from the Lakers’ first closed-door session of training camp on Wednesday coated in sweat, but giggling with giddy enthusiasm.
They had just spent the morning in a pressure cooker, the walls of the team’s El Segundo facility echoing with spicy jabs and heat-of-the-moment spats. One got the sense there was little love lost during the session, but that is just the kind of energy the Lakers are looking for.
“That’s how we get better, competing against each other, talking (expletive) and all that,” Davis said. “That’s who we are. We’ve got a lot of (expletive)-talkers on the team. … It’s going to be a great year.”
In addition to having some of the league’s most grizzled veterans on the roster, the Lakers also boast perhaps the NBA’s best concentration of motor-mouthed, fiery personalities. And while they’ll reserve their fire for the players in opposing jerseys, they have plenty for each other, too.
Rajon Rondo set the tone on Tuesday when he said Westbrook, a longtime peer and rival, would be looking to “destroy” him in practice: “Likewise, I’m looking to destroy him.”
That’s the kind of challenge that warms Westbrook’s heart.
“It’s a reason why a lot of these guys are (future) Hall of Famers,” Westbrook said Wednesday. “Competing, having competitive spirit, it’s a part of our practice.”
One of the biggest things that stood out to Coach Frank Vogel was Westbrook’s speed: The Lakers’ coach called the 32-year-old “a blur out there” who was attacking the paint with the abandon that once made him the 2017 league MVP.
The scene sparked Vogel’s imagination of how dangerous the Lakers’ up-tempo offense can be once they begin to gel, particularly with Westbrook and LeBron James taking turns tossing long passes to one another in the open court.
“When the ball’s outleted to Bron, Russ has gotta fly; when the ball’s outleted to Russ, Bron’s gonna fly,” Vogel said. “And that’s the best way to complement those guys.”
But the other standout piece Vogel and his players noted was the competitiveness, which played out during five-on-five sessions that saw James, Davis and Westbrook get a number of repetitions together. The only time it started bubbling over, Vogel said, was when the players started getting frustrated with stand-in officiating: “Our competitive guys don’t like to be called for fouls.”
One of the players who could benefit most from this environment is Davis, who has acknowledged as much. Last season saw his production dip, driven in large part by a non-existent offseason that started him off slow then made worse by injuries that set him back even further. Add to the mix underwhelming showings, especially late in the regular season as the Lakers slid into the play-in round.
For those intermittent sequences of games when he’s not playing up to his All-NBA standard, now he doesn’t just have James in his ear; he’s got Westbrook, Rondo, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, DeAndre Jordan and a number of veterans who won’t let him off the hook. Davis said Westbrook had pulled him aside several times in the first practice alone to give him feedback.
“I don’t need encouragement – I want to be pushed,” Davis said. “I want guys to tell me when I’m messing up.”
Westbrook sees Davis as one of his main partners, especially on offense, where the two hope to thrive running pick-and-roll actions. While offseason conditioning boasts have become a weary trope in professional sports, several Lakers players and coaches have emphasized that Davis is in much-improved form compared to last season, when he tried to gradually ramp into the year after just two months off. Accordingly, Vogel said he’s ramping up training camp activity more aggressively than his approach last season.On Spectrum SportsNet, James said he looked forward to seeing a “very angry Anthony Davis” – the version the Lakers saw sneering over the Denver Nuggets after hitting a game-winning shot in the 2020 Western Conference finals.
Getting that version of the Brow might just take some of their own tough love in the meantime. And they’re not afraid to dole it out.
