The obvious was keeping Clarkson in the game way too long. He was killing the Jazz on both ends. Even when he wasn't shooting, he was dribbling a ton and looking for an attack before anything else. If Conley was on a hard minutes limit, there were several other options to play besides Conley.
The players have to carry some blame for their poor decision making, but at some point Quin needed to reign them in and attack the switching defense differently. We weren't getting the ball to Gobert down low and were content to dribble out the clock doing nothing at the top. They missed him several times in favor of hunting their own shots on the perimeter and they weren't even attacking the weakest defenders. They kept attacking Reaves, probably because he's white, but also a much better defender than Monk/WB. When a defense is switching everything, you have to involve their worst defenders. Monk/WB didn't have to defend anything. Simply setting a screen with Royce, on or off ball, would have made Monk/WB have to play defense. There was no diversity in their attack, didn't even set up a post up for Bogey who would have had the advantage on WB, THT, or Reaves in the post.
Defensively they fell apart because of freaking Stanley Johnson. Setting the pick with LeBron was creative strategy by the Lakers. It's ok if it works once, but they kept going to it over and over and scored nearly every time. That should have have obviously been a switch. Gobert can guard LeBron just fine and if he can't we should have help defenders bc the Lakers had no shooting out there. What did we get instead? SJ with free lanes to the basket, free wide open shots, and zero help from anyone outside of the action. The Lakers were playing 3-4 bad shooters at a time but we were playing as if they were all elite shooters with the lack of help. Simply playing a zone for couple possessions would have mucked up the Lakers offense but we let them milk the SJ/LBJ PnR.
