LOS ANGELES — Whatever holiday cheer the Lakers might have started Thursday with was nowhere to be found following a 119-96 Christmas Day loss to the Rockets.
It was Los Angeles’ third straight defeat, its sixth in its past 10 games, and it was so lopsided it caused coach JJ Redick to call into question his team’s professionalism.
“We don’t care enough right now,” Redick said. “And that’s the part that bothers you a lot. We don’t care enough to do the things that are necessary. We don’t care enough to be a professional.”
The downturn has been so alarming that Redick said it must be addressed immediately this weekend before the Lakers’ next game, Sunday at home against the Sacramento Kings.
“Saturday’s practice — I told the guys — it’s going to be uncomfortable,” Redick said. “The meeting is going to be uncomfortable. I’m not doing another 53 games like this.”
Game No. 29 for the 19-10 Lakers was barely competitive. The Rockets jumped out to a 14-point lead in the first quarter and never trailed. They never really came close to trailing, leading by double digits for the entire second half.
“The two words of the day were effort and execution,” Redick said. “And I feel like when we’ve done both of those things at a high level, we’ve been a good basketball team. When we haven’t, we’re a terrible basketball team. And tonight we were a terrible basketball team. And that started legitimately right away.”
Luka Doncic, who returned after missing the past 1½ games with a left calf contusion, turned the ball over three times in the first 2 minutes, 11 seconds of playing time.
The Rockets were not only getting more offensive opportunities off Doncic’s miscues, Houston was also hounding the glass when it missed a shot. For the game, Houston outrebounded Los Angeles 48-25, with 17 of those being offensive boards.
All 10 of the Lakers’ losses this season have been by 10 or more points. After a similarly dispirited 132-108 loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday, Redick questioned his team’s commitment to playing the right way and even called out a player — without using his name — for being unfamiliar with a basic part of the Lakers’ strategy.
He echoed those critiques Thursday, again pointing to specific players who are unprepared — without using any names.
“It’s a matter of making the choice,” Redick said. “And too often, we have guys that don’t want to make that choice. And it’s pretty consistent who those guys are.”
While Los Angeles got Doncic and Rui Hachimura (right groin strain) back in the lineup against Houston, it lost another key player, Austin Reaves, at halftime because of soreness in his left calf — a preexisting injury that recently caused him to sit three games. Reaves will undergo an MRI on Friday, and his status moving forward is unknown.
Doncic led the Lakers with 25 points and seven assists, but he also had a team-worst six turnovers.
“I don’t know what has to change, but definitely something needs to change,” Doncic said. “Think we [were] blown out the last three games. It definitely looks, like, terrible. We got to figure out, that’s the thing we have [to do]. … We just got to talk about it. Everybody got to talk about it. I know JJ said it’s going to be uncomfortable [for everybody]. As they should be.”
He added: “Everybody has got to give better effort, starting with me.”
LeBron James scored 18 points, and Los Angeles was outscored by 33 points in the 32 minutes he was in the game, making it his worst plus-minus performance as a Laker and third worst in any game of his career, according to ESPN Insights.
James, Hachimura and Marcus Smart, who started the second half in Reaves’ place, declined to speak to reporters after the game. That left two role players, Jake LaRavia and Jarred Vanderbilt, to speak about the state of the team.
“It might be a disconnect right now,” LaRavia said. “I don’t know what it is, but we just have to be able to reel it back in and get back on the right track.”
Vanderbilt, who had 11 points and five rebounds off the bench and earned the best plus-minus on the team with a plus-5 in 27 minutes, said the team has reached a critical juncture of the season.
“Ultimately, certain stuff just needs to be said and certain stuff needs to be done, and we got to be able to communicate with each other and be receptive of it, whether it’s criticism or, we got to have them hard conversations,” Vanderbilt said. “JJ [was] alluding to that, that you got to have these conversations. We don’t want this to keep lingering. And right now it’s three in a row, but we don’t want it to keep going the wrong direction.”
