(Anthony Davis injury: How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)
Despite playing Stephen Curry in roughly half of their games, they had the best defense in the playoffs. The majority of the postseason has seen Davis block off the whole paint, which is partly to blame for this. Yet the Lakers have no alternatives. They’ve rarely even used a backup center this postseason.
Wenyen Gabriel has given the Lakers just 34 minutes this postseason. Most of the time, when Davis is out, the Lakers simply play small with LeBron James and Rui Hachimura sharing center duties. It largely hasn’t gone well. In 130 minutes without Davis during the playoffs, the Lakers have been outscored by 18 points.
By the seat of their trousers, they can make it through brief periods. A entire game without Davis, though? The Lakers are not actually capable of doing that.And yet there’s a chance that’s exactly the situation the Lakers may find themselves in come Friday night when they host the Golden State Warriors for Game 6 of their second-round series. Davis sustained some type of head injury in the fourth quarter of Game 5 and did not return.
The early prognosis appears to be positive, and the but there is no official diagnosis yet. Davis might be back for Game 6. He might be out for the rest of the series. We don’t know. The Lakers don’t either. They have to be prepared for either possibility. 
Without using your greatest player, there is no effective winning strategy. This is especially true if your entire system depends on the player’s exceptional talents. However, lesser NBA teams do occasionally win games. This season, every NBA club won at least 17 games. Both of the Warriors’ games this season versus the Pistons ended in losses.
Upsets happen, especially in tiny sample sizes. The Lakers don’t need to devise a strategy to beat the Warriors four times out of seven. They need to try something that can work once, for 48 minutes, that could at least give them a chance to reach the Western Conference finals. (Anthony Davis injury: How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)
Such a path exists, but it’s fairly narrow and carries enormous risk. If the Lakers do indeed have to play Game 6 without Davis, here are the basic strategies they should consider as they would be attempting to pull off what would be an enormous upset.
Turn the game into a shooting contest
This strategy is going to sound counterintuitive. The Lakers have struggled to shoot 3’s all season, and the Warriors are the greatest 3-point shooting team in NBA history. Over a sustained sample size, the Lakers would have no chance to win a shootout against the Warriors. But we’re not dealing with a sustained sample here. We’re dealing with 48 minutes. The Lakers can’t outshoot the Warriors for a series. They might be able to do so for an hour.
Shooting 3’s is the single most important thing an underdog can do because shooting 3’s increases a game’s variance. The longer the shot, the more randomness is typically at play. If you shoot 50 3’s, you might make six of them and lose by 40 points. But you might also make 22 of them and score enough points to overcome a superior opponent.
The reverse can be true for your opponent. The Warriors have broken through offensively for stretches of the past two games largely because they’ve been able to get Davis out of the paint and finally score at the rim. They scored 70 points in the first half of Game 5 partially because they’d seemingly figured out how to find layups against the Lakers.
But in the third quarter? They scored only 23 points because they missed all nine of their 3-point attempts. When the other team gets layups, it is frequently going to make most of them. But once you’ve forced them to take jumpers? You’ve introduced the possibility that they might miss.
If all of this just sounds like a fancy way of saying “hope you get lucky,” well, yeah, that’s the gist of this. Without Davis, the Lakers can’t beat the Warriors on skill. Luck is their best bet if they’re shorthanded.
(Anthony Davis injury: How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)
This should be a priority for the Lakers anyway. Golden State has outscored the Lakers on fast breaks in four of the five games they’ve played in this series. Their pace in Game 5 in particular really wore the Lakers out, and the Warriors visibly out-hustled the Lakers in transition for most of the game. Transition defense has been a flaw for the Lakers all season, but it’s been magnified against Golden State. (Anthony Davis injury: How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)
Going smaller is a possible antidote for several problems here. It puts more shooting on the floor, but it also gives the Lakers more speed to chase the Warriors down in transition. Gabriel can’t do a reasonable Davis imitation for 30 minutes. By overusing their few remaining big men, the Lakers would be trying to play a style they don’t have the personnel to maximize.
Instead, their path should be to try a different style entirely that fits with the players they do have available. The Lakers have guards, shooting and speed. That’s what they need to emphasize right now.
So while the Lakers can employ a number of strategies designed to accommodate their status as an underdog if Davis is out, none of it matters if James is only taking a few shots every quarter. They’re going to need something closer to the version of him that scored 51 points in Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals if they’re realistically going to beat the defending champs shorthanded. (Anthony Davis injury: How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)
Maybe that player still exists within James. He did average nearly 35 points during the month or so that Davis was out during the regular season. But it’s been months since we’ve seen James play so aggressively. He was healthier then than he is now. If the Lakers are going to have any chance at winning Game 6 without Davis, it starts and ends with a legendary LeBron performance. We haven’t seen one yet this postseason. Maybe the desperation of Game 6 coaxes one last throwback out of the man who once overcame a 3-1 deficit to beat these very Warriors.
(How the Lakers can still beat the Warriors)