The hardest moment for the Lakers was that Kobe Bryant didn't find his niche at the beginning of the season, causing the Lakers to get off to a bad start and lose the battle with the Warriors for the first place in the league from the start?

Or did the mid-season youngsters start to get frizzy and forced D'Antoni to rest in the full-rounder rotation?

Or was Liu Ren injured by a blackfoot before All-Star Weekend?

No, there are ways to solve these problems, and D'Antoni has found a way to get the Lakers through it.

After communicating with the coaching staff and management, Kobe Bryant abandoned a lot of things, became a role player, found his own positioning, and even Kobe Bryant and Liu Ren took turns off, so that the young players saw the strictness of the coaching staff, and the young players also settled down and worked hard to help the team compete for the championship, and all this before made the Lakers play well during Liu Ren's injury and suspension.

However, Liu Ren's return from injury this time really put the Lakers in the most difficult moment.

Liu Ren needs to lose weight, so he needs a lot of physical training, and he has to do it, because there is only one month before the playoffs, and at the same time, he must firmly play more tactics with Liu Ren as the first core, so that Liu Ren can find the feeling of cooperating with his teammates.

In fact, if these two things are done separately, it will be easy to do, but when the two things are piled together, it will test D'Antoni's patience.

Because Liu Ren is doing aerobic training every day to lose fat, the feeling of shooting is almost a change every day, and when he finds the right feeling, he is accurate, and then after a day or two of physical training during the break, the next game is ironclad.

This is not only a headache for D'Antoni, but the Lakers players are also playing very aggrieved, sometimes Liu Ren is seen by the opponent after he is not in good shape, so he catches Liu Ren and cuts off his contact with the other players of the Lakers team, and plays according to the Lakers.

Since last season, how have the Lakers suffered such humiliation? But this humiliation will have to go on for a while......

The Lakers are bent on finding Liu Ren's form, which has led to their record being quite unstable, and whether a game is won or lost, fans only dare to guess after seeing Liu Ren's performance after he plays.

After the loss to the Warriors, the Lakers only played a 3-4 record in the remaining seven games in March, and after the game in March, the Lakers' record became 56-18.

In April, the Lakers have eight games left, and after eight games are played, the regular season schedule for all teams in the league will end on April 18, and half of the teams will start their playoff opener on April 19.

The Lakers' final two games were back-to-back games against the Clippers and Clippers on April 15 and 16.

However, this is not so important to the Lakers at this stage, because the run-in with Liu Ren is still the most critical thing.

After Liu Ren's comeback in the second half of March, the tacit understanding between other Lakers players and Liu Ren has gradually recovered, but Liu Ren has some problems with his own state, giving the opponent a lot of opportunities to target, and now the rest is to use the game to continue to find Liu Ren's state.

In the first three games in April, the Lakers' opponents were relatively weak, namely the Heat, Pelicans, and Jazz, these three games were simply timely rain, and the three teams were unable to make an effective defense against the Lakers......

……

……

"240 pounds, boss, congratulations, after these 20 days of training, your body has returned to its best condition, even better than before you were injured, and your body fat percentage is only 5.3 percent! Look at your arms and calves, these muscles, I promise you won't even float in the sea. Gary Vidi exaggeratedly said that Liu Ren's training was finally completed, and he was also relieved.

"Gary, it's not funny at all, if I had just been injured and you had asked me to go back to training, I would have lost weight a long time ago." Liu Ren gave Gary Vidi a blank look.

"It's true that if you don't go to the game at the end of the ban and focus on losing weight, you can do it in 10 days." Gary Wadi replied.

"That's right! I've played so badly in these dozen games, I might as well go to training. Liu Ren looked at the smiling magician and D'Antoni on the side and said.

In the 11 games after Liu Ren's comeback, he averaged 27 points, 8 rebounds and 7 assists per game, and it seems that the statistics are much better than before the injury? But the efficiency is as low as Derrick Rose's injury, and it's all about a lot of shots and a lot of possession.

Just look at other data, plus the last three consecutive 40+ games, Liu Ren averaged 25 shots per game, with a shooting rate of 42.8 percent, that is, the highest average shot per game in his career plus the lowest shooting rate in his career, this is still the last three games with a shooting rate of more than 50%, and the shooting rate in the first eight games is only 40.1 percent, which will reach 40 percent.

In terms of possession time, Liu Ren's recent game possession time is longer than that of Paul and Westbrook, who have the longest possession time in the league, and he has become a ball bully!

This high-shot, high-possession time and inefficient game made Liu Ren feel that it was better not to play.

Even though the magician was complained, he still had his trademark smile: "Boss, you can't stop fighting the game, you should know ......"

Before the magician finished speaking, Liu Ren interrupted him: "Yes, yes, I know, I need to cultivate a tacit understanding with my teammates first, and I also need to find the feeling of shooting in the game to prepare for the playoffs. But in the past 20 days, if I lose weight first, and then practice shooting to find a feeling, wouldn't I be able to complete these trainings faster and better? It doesn't affect the record, we are all about to be caught up by the Spurs. ”

"They overtook them...... There's nothing wrong with that," said the magician and D'Antoni with a little laugh, "but I don't think they'll easily overtake us." ”

"Why?"

Liu Ren is a little strange, when the Spurs were about to contrast the Lakers, they suddenly began to lose some games inexplicably, and it seemed that they deliberately kept pace with the Lakers to win and lose, the Lakers lost, they lost immediately, the Lakers won, they won, of course, there are times when the main team can't lose when the whole rotation is rested......

Now the Spurs have a 58-18 record and the Lakers have a 59-18 record, and the Lakers are only half a win ahead of the Spurs.

Liu Ren is a little anxious about this, the first place in the West will definitely not be won, the Warriors are now 69-8, and they are the only team in the league that has more than 60 wins, and they have long locked the first place in the league.

But if the Spurs overtake the second place in the West, Liu Ren said that he couldn't accept it, but it seems that the Lakers management and coaching staff don't care at all.

'You just have to play well, you've been in good form in the last few games and hopefully you can continue it.' Magic decisively changed the topic, deliberately losing this kind of thing, the coaching staff can make tactical "mistakes" for the sake of playoff rankings, but players must not have this mentality, let alone Liu Ren, a notoriously big mouth, who knows if he can't help but say it.

"These few games are too weak opponents, and I don't know what I can do with these difficult opponents next." Speaking of this, Liu Ren was a little stupid, the recent sluggish feeling made him very disappointed, although he was not depressed, but he definitely had self-doubt.

"Boss, you have to believe in yourself, you are our strongest player, where is the boss who scored sixty or seventy points casually last season, and who scored more points than the opponent's team all the time!"

“……”