LOS ANGELES — The last time the Lakers faced the Denver Nuggets, a week and a half ago on the road, Deandre Ayton left the game at the 4:30 mark in the first quarter in a 120-113 loss.
Ayton departed the game with left knee soreness, the Lakers said, keeping him out of the back-to-back at home the next night against the Indiana Pacers. This result would start the run of victories that provided the Lakers with seven wins out of their last eight games entering Saturday.
After the Lakers starting center had already left Ball Arena in Denver, veteran guard Marcus Smart shared that Ayton was “down,” frustrated with not being able help a comeback effort amid public discourse in the aftermath of a late-February ESPN article in which the Lakers center was quoted as saying, “They’re trying to make me Clint Capela; I’m not no Clint Capela.”
Ayton was seemingly referencing his role on the Lakers, no longer playing as the star he entered the league as with No. 1 draft pick expectations, but often as the fourth-leading scorer on the floor.
“I know as of lately he’s been getting a lot of backlash for his effort and his play,” Smart said on March 5. “He understands it. I know it might not seem like it, but he does, and he wants to do good, and he wants to help this team and I think that’s what more frustrating for him, because he’s trying.”
Ayton, after turning in back-to-back 30-plus-minute performances with high-intensity offensive rebounding efforts in double-double stat lines, said Thursday that he felt his energy and focus had caught up to the rest of his teammates amid their stretch on the floor.
“If something’s not working, you’re gonna fix it,” Ayton said when asked Thursday if there was anything in specific that sparked the focus shift. “I don’t know what it is that happened. Just gotta get up and fix it.”
The 7-footer has tallied 11-combined offensive rebounds across the pair of victories against the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Chicago Bulls. In the eight games – including his early exit against Denver – before returning to the starting lineup on Sunday against the New York Knicks, Ayton grabbed just five offensive rebounds.
Lakers coach JJ Redick said that ever since Ayton’s first stint, about seven minutes, in the team’s 110-97 victory over the Knicks earlier this week, he’s noticed that Ayton has played with “a lot of force.” Ayton recorded multiple blocks, met a Luka Doncic pass for an alley-oop and made an offensive rebound, outhustling Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns, to create a second-chance 3-pointer for Austin Reaves.
“You can you can feel him out there,” Redick said. “The pursuit of the basketball, his offensive rebounds the last two games, to get 11 in those games, it was huge. A big reason we won the Chicago game, we got 30 second-chance points, and he was right there at the forefront of that.”
Redick added that Ayton is accomplishing the small tasks too, re-becoming a vital part of the Lakers’ pick-and-roll game with his screens – helping create for Doncic and Reaves, and receiving for close-range looks as well.
“I think his screening has gotten back to what it was at the beginning of the year,” he said. “That’s an important part of our offense, and what we do is just the ability to screen, and he’s been really good there, but it all comes from a place of force.”