It’s Christmas, the Lakers got a gift when Steve Nash returned the other night, and finally they look like a team out west. Nash said it’s not enough, and in an interview via ESPN L.A., Nash wants the Lakers to “play like a desperate team every night out.”
“Hopefully, we can continue to win,” Nash said after practice Monday on the eve of the Lakers’ Christmas Day showdown with the New York Knicks. “We’ve won four in a row and we can keep this going and put ourselves back in contention, but we should be a desperate team right now.”
“I think we realize the position we’re in,” Nash said. “We can’t drop games. We got to go out there and try to win every single game and go for wins instead of trying to adjust and figure out what we’re doing. You got to win games and figure it out afterwards what transition this team needs.”
“I think this is a team that’s got to do it together,” Nash said. “I think that’s really the Achilles’ heel is this roster, with all this talent: everyone trying to make a linear calculation of how good we should be, and the point is we’re not going to be the sum of our parts or more than the sum of our parts unless we do it together. So, we’ve all got to figure this out together. We’ve got to sacrifice and we’ve got to earn it every day.”
With 4 straight wins, the Lakers have pulled within a game of .500 at 13-14. Even with such a terrible start, they are only 8 games out of the top spot in the West.
The NBA season is a marathon and not a sprint, so it’s most importantly that this team starts to pick up steam now.