The Lakers missed a much needed scoring punch from Russell Westbrook in the narrow loss against the Mavericks at Crypto.com Arena.
In 38 minutes of play the 33-year-old superstar scored 12 points, grabbed 6 rebounds and dished out 8 assists. Westbrook was 5-17 from the field and missed all of his four three-pointers.
According to Lakers head coach Frank Vogel, the team will keep supporting the point guard as he looks to recover from the slump.
“We’re all going to keep supporting him,” Vogel said. “We all have to play better as a team, coaches got to coach better, players got to play better. I know he’s going to be hard on himself but we’re being hard on ourselves right now.
“I though that he had zero turnovers after the last game our team at 24 turnovers was a positive. He’s just not finishing at the basket right now and he’s not knocking down threes. He’s gonna make 30 percent of them. He’s just struggling in both areas right now.
“But we’ll keep supporting him, keep putting him in positions to succeed. We adjusted the rotation a bit tonight. We tried to give our team more space, we played more with the smaller lineups to open up the paint. I think overall that helped our team keep their turnovers down. Like with everything, we’re going to keep looking for answers to try to get us over the hump.”
This season Westbrook is averaging 18.2 points, 7.7 rebounds and 7.3 assists in 34.4 minutes per game for the Lakers.
