Los Angeles Lakers vs. Portland Trail Blazers

The Portland Trail Blazers stagger into Los Angeles to face the Lakers, their injury bug stinging like a tarantula hawk.

Anfernee Simons is still out, Robert Williams III won’t be returning this season, Scoot Henderson will have to wait two to three weeks to even be reevaluated, and Malcolm Brogdon was ruled out of today’s game yesterday. Any analysis of Blazers games for the foreseeable future should include a giant, bold asterisk that reads, “team projected to be bad in the first place is missing its best player and multiple key rotation pieces.”

The news that Ish Wainright has been upgraded to questionable and that the Blazers signed Jamaree Bouyea to a two-way contract doesn’t make up for it, and while Skylar Mays has earned a full NBA contract, it doesn’t add talent this early in the season when he still has plenty of NBA eligibility left.

With that in mind, the Blazers may face a pretty healthy Lakers team… or they may not! LeBron James missed part of their last game due to a soft tissue injury and is labeled as “day-to-day” along with his co-star and the man LeBron was expected to throw the Lakers torch to, Anthony Davis.

Even if the Blazers play the Lakers with their two stars, Portland will be facing a team that hasn’t yet found its footing or is content to sit back and wait until the games matter more. Despite having a superior record, the Lakers have the NBA’s sixth-worst point differential, a few ticks worse than the Blazers. Given that, the injury concern, and how early in the season a LeBron team can be at its best, it’s anyone’s guess whether this game will be a spirited battle or a second-quarter blowout snooze fest.

Los Angeles Lakers vs. Portland Trail Blazers – Sun. Nov. 12 – 7:00 p.m. PST

How to watch on TV: Root Sports, NBA League Pass

Trail Blazers injuries: Anfernee Simons, Scoot Henderson, Robert Williams III, Malcolm Brogdon;

Lakers injuries: Jalen Hood-Schifino, Gabe Vincent, Jarred Vanderbilt (out); LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Jaxson Hayes (day-to-day).

What to Watch For

• Jerami Grant chasing history. What does the following sequence mean to you? 13, 15, 17, 22, 24, 26, 27, 38. If you guessed “cursed locker combination,” you’d be right, but it’s ALSO Jerami Grant’s scoring totals in the first eight games of the season. According to Trail Blazers reporter Casey Holdahl, it’s also the first time in NBA history that someone has topped their scoring in each of the first eight games of a given season, and it’s nine if you count the last game of the last season. The NBA record? 10 straight games by Willis Reed, who played his last NBA game in 1974 when Nixon resigned from office in shame. Grant may not be able to go for 39 or better and put pressure on Reed’s record, but for the Blazers to have a chance to win this game, he might just have to.
• LeBron James’ availability. For an NBA player in his 21st NBA season, his productivity is a marvel. But LeBron is only human after all, and the Lakers championship hopes this season absolutely rest on his availability. To that end, Lakers Coach Darvin Ham tried instituting a 30-minute limit to start the season, a plan that LeBron agreed to… then swiftly tossed aside. He’s averaged over 35 minutes a game this season, and unfortunately suffered a non-contact left calf contusion in the Lakers’ win over the Phoenix Suns a few days ago, putting his availability against Portland in doubt. Even if he’s limited, James commands defensive attention when he plays and is both smart and strong enough to get position at will, especially against a Portland team with a thin frontcourt and a gaggle of players with little NBA experience.
• Young vs. Old… sort of. At first thought, you would assume the Blazers were MUCH younger than the Lakers. One team is just beginning a rebuild around a teenager, and the other is trying to squeeze one last championship out of a soon-to-be-39-year-old. But the data (beautifully visualized by Sravan NBA on Twitter/X) tell a slightly different story. Weighted by minutes played, the bulk of either teams’ rotations are similarly aged. On the other hand, this doesn’t capture injuries to Blazers veterans Malcolm Brogdon and Robert Williams III. Their replacements will all be 24 or younger, and beyond calendar age, the lack of NBA experience is very likely to contrast with the Lakers whose rotation is mostly players with five or more years of experience (Austin Reaves being the notable exception). The graph below showing the age distribution across the league may either confirm or challenge your preexisting notions of who the whippersnappers and the grizzled veterans are.

About the Opponent

After Cam Reddish’s somewhat surprising promotion from the bench to the starting lineup, Trevor Lane of Lakers Nation explores in a brief video whether the former Blazer will be starting for Los Angeles moving forward: