JJ Redick on the Lakers' tough schedule

[ASFN Admin]

The Los Angeles Lakers are moving through arguably the toughest stretch of their schedule. On Wednesday, they will start their third and final set of back-to-back games in a span of eight days when they host the Denver Nuggets one night before they face Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks.

They recently went winless on a four-game road trip, but they rebounded by defeating the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs on Sunday and Monday, respectively. While their schedule will be more manageable after Thursday, it won't get that much easier either, as they will play the Memphis Grizzlies, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets and Oklahoma City Thunder in the coming weeks. In fact, Los Angeles will face the Rockets and Thunder twice each.

Head coach JJ Redick knows there are no excuses for his team, as it is simply the way the schedule tends to work out late in the NBA season.

Via Lakers Nation:

“Yeah, it was a couple weeks ago in film at the facility,” Redick said of when he spoke to the Lakers on their schedule. “I was just talking to CP [Chris Paul] in the hallway about a half an hour again and he was like ‘Man, the schedule sucks.’ Talking about the Spurs schedule. It just feels like this time of year, we’re packing in a ton of games. The NFL is over and so for a team like us, they’re fitting us in all of the national TV slots now, which creates a back-to-back in Milwaukee-Denver.

“Back-to-backs, it’s just part of the NBA. Every team goes through it at different points. So no one is gonna feel sorry for us and we can’t feel sorry for ourselves. You gotta play the game in front of you and then move on to the next thing and try to get better. I think as we start getting everybody back, they will be a lot of tough parts of the schedule still to go, but we knew this two weeks, last week starting with the Boston game through this homestand, was gonna be a huge challenge.”

L.A. heads into Wednesday's game in fourth place in the Western Conference with a 42-25 record, and a win over the Nuggets, who are in third place, would move it past the Nuggets in the standings. At the same time, it only has a 3.5-game cushion over the seventh-place Minnesota Timberwolves in its quest to avoid the play-in tournament.

The Lakers have had to go through the play-in tournament three times in the previous four seasons, and the one season they didn't was the season when it didn't qualify for the play-in tourney.

This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: JJ Redick on the Lakers' tough schedule

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