The Lakers's offensive performance in D'Antoni's second game is not what his offense is designed to produce.


SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The comic relief may have lightened the mood among the media late Wednesday night, but new Lakers coach Mike D'Antoni wasn't feeling any better after his second game on the job.

And this had nothing to do with his recent knee replacement surgery that's left him hobbling like an extra in 'The Walking Dead.'

The first loss of the D'Antoni era came in the most unexpected of ways, the lowly Sacramento Kings outworking the lackluster Lakers and making Pau Gasol look like a soothsayer for his comment made after a win over Brooklyn in D'Antoni's debut at the Staples Center the night before.

"They're all going to be hard," Gasol had said. "Every team likes to beat the Lakers."

Not that he or many of his teammates did much to stop the Kings, who won the game 113-97. All the momentum of the post-Mike Brown Lakers came to a halt -- the five wins in six tries that seemed to justify the surprising decision to ditch the defense-first mentality and laborious Princeton offense that came with the former coach. What this was, D'Antoni had said with a laugh perhaps so he didn't cry, was "Muppet time" instead of "Showtime ... like we were wrestling in mud ... like watching sap out of a tree."

Watching D'Antoni was far more entertaining. The looks of disbelief after so many blown defensive assignments (most notably in Sacramento's 40-point, fourth-quarter), that get-off-my-lawn glare after a haphazard possession or any of their 20 turnovers, and those zombie walks up and down the court that happened only in his moments of maximum frustration.

"The first half might (have been) the worst basketball I've seen in 10 years," D'Antoni had said of the 41 points his team mustered before the break. "I was in shock."

Sure, they only had time for two practices in the 10 days since D'Antoni was hired instead of former coach Phil Jackson. But his "amoeba" offense – as his older brother and newest Lakers assistant coach, Dan D'Antoni, prefers to call it – was supposed to prevent nights like this, to mold itself around the strengths of the talent that's available and be self-sustaining even in its most elementary state. This system, at least on this night, looked more like a virus.

It was enough to make you wonder if the new coach might have any doubts creep in at this early juncture, thoughts about this roster that hardly resembles his fabled Phoenix teams of old and whether or not it's compatible enough to win the title so many expect. Yet as D'Antoni leaned against a wall near the visitor's locker room, the frequent grimaces continuing for both basketball and medical reasons, he insisted that this task is not too tall.

"Oh no, no, we'll get it done," he told USA TODAY Sports after the loss. "We're going to get it done. We've just got to have a little more of a healthier roster. But we'll get it done.

"The biggest point is, and I don't want to belabor the point, but Steve (Nash) is a big part of this, and we need to get him healthy and get him back."

Not that Brown was given the same treatment, but judgements will and should be reserved until D'Antoni's partner in "Seven Seconds or Less" returns. It really is that simple right now for the Lakers, who have been without the point guard who they traded for last summer since he fractured a fibula in his left leg on Oct. 31 and have no timetable for his return (though he's scheduled to be re-examined this weekend). This isn't just any future Hall of Famer, of course, but the one who perfected D'Antoni's up-tempo, pick-and-roll heavy offense during their time together in Phoenix, from 2004 to 2008.

Nash's back-up, Steve Blake, has missed the past five games with a strained abdomen and is expected to miss Friday's game at Memphis and Saturday's game at Dallas. The replacements for both Steves are average at best, with second-year player Darius Morris and veteran Chris Duhon relinquishing lead role to Kobe Bryant on most possessions as default best option. Yet even the masterful Bryant can't run this offense like Nash.

"The tempo amoebas to the player itself," Dan D'Antoni said before the game. "You've got faster players, it gets faster. You got slower players, it slows down. But the concept is the same. OK, so you score in nine seconds (with the Lakers). So what? The idea is to score. Maybe 16 seconds, 18 seconds, it doesn't matter. We've got 24 seconds, so we're going to try to score wherever it is."

The Lakers have 11 fast break points combined in two games since D'Antoni took over after averaging 13.6 in the five games under interim coach Bernie Bickerstaff and Bryant wants to speed things up and pinpointed Gasol as someone who needs to step on the gas.

"We kind of know what to do, it's just about getting in the spots, and you've got to run a little bit more," said Bryant, who maintained his lead in the league's scoring race with a 38-point outing against Sacramento. "You've got to kind of pick up the pace a little bit – particularly Pau. Dwight's (Howard) used to running - he's not in tip-top shape (because of April back surgery) but he will be. But Pau is used to kind of just laboring up the floor, coasting a little bit. And in this offense, you've really got to kind of put the motor on in the first few steps and get up the court."

As evidenced by Bryant, the players will need to police themselves to a certain extent on both ends of the floor. But D'Antoni, who is sometimes using a crutch to get through practices and has relied on Dan to assist with his early teachings, is well aware that he needs to gain the trust of his new players too.

"These are veteran players and they know what to do," Mike D'Antoni said "I just think that little by little, they need to trust me and I need to trust them and find out their strengths and weaknesses. Like Dwight (four shots and seven points) didn't get the ball tonight, so we've got to figure out why and fix it.

"He's just got to trust me to know that I'm going to go back and figure it out. Just little things like that. I think we're there. I think we're cool. But again, this is a little step backwards (against the Kings) and we've got to get over this."

And make no mistake: the D'Antonis always want to get up and go. That's how their father, Lewis, coached the local high school team in Mullens, W. Va., during their childhood and it's how they went on to teach the game as they both became coaches on their own.

(Mike) D'Antoni was living proof that an up-tempo style could net a pleasing payoff, as he was a star point guard and all-time leading scorer for Milan back when Bryant was growing up watching both he and his father, Joe "Jellybean" Bryant, play in Italy.

"Our dad played fast basketball, but we were always taught to keep things simple," said Dan D'Antoni, a former Marshall point guard in the late 1960s and long-time high-school coach who first partnered with Mike as an assistant in Phoenix and was with him in New York for the last three seasons as well. "We always felt like when you turned down a shot, that's a mistake. If it's a make-able shot that you were used to making, it's a mistake. And we always felt that players shot better with the shots they picked rather than the one the coach picked for him. We just played out that way, and as anything starts it's like anything else – once you start from the concept, if you keep thinking on it it naturally grows and keeps doing different things."

Take the open shot. Move the ball. Find the energy. Space the floor. Bury the three. And run.

The to-do list isn't terribly long just yet, but Mike D'Antoni has kept it that way on purpose. For all the simplicity of his system – wings running to their spots in the deep corners and acting like turrets on a castle, big men setting high screens and rolling down a wide-open lane and such – there is much more to come. Over time, a selfless, free-flowing, fun style that rewards stars and role players alike is supposed to emerge.

No one can blame D'Antoni for wanting to take it slow, as he had planned on recovering in his New York area home for "another month" before being active again but adjusted because, well, he's coaching the Lakers. The challenge goes beyond installing his new offense and blending tremendous talent, as D'Antoni is doing it without the benefit of a training camp or preseason.

"We're on our ABCs (of the offense) right now," Dan D'Antoni said. "There's no depth to this movement. You're working out of concepts and ABCDs, and in order to understand the concept you need to know the variety of things that are within the concept. And right now we probably have, in each concept, maybe two things. But once you get to five or six, it enhances everything.

"It becomes a thinking man's offense. It allows players who feel the game, who think the game a little bit, the freedom to make their own choices with the space to play in. That's kind of what we try to create, and Mike just does a great job of putting that in."

As Morris said, the key difference between the new system and the read-and-react Princeton offense that Brown had installed in training camp is that it's not an all-or-nothing approach anymore. Whereas the Princeton often left players reacting far too robotically as they processed the infinite possibilities, D'Antoni's system can be more functional immediately even though his new players are a long ways from full comprehension.

"As opposed to the Princeton, where everybody has to be on the same page, now everybody just has to be spaced and then you've got a chance," Morris said. "The spacing is way more open for everyone to make a play. It allows everybody to be more aggressive. Sometimes in the Princeton, you attack, and if you don't attack right or that person reads off you, it gets cluttered."

The question of whether D'Antoni can make the three-pointer anywhere close to as vital to the Lakers as it was to his record-breaking Suns remains to be seen. He became a beyond-the-arc believer while coaching in Italy during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when his championship teams in the Italian League always led the pack from three-point range and Mike called Dan to convince him to have his high school teams launch from long-range too.

But if the loss against the Kings was any indication, even a good night from the Lakers shooters won't always be enough to protect Howard in the paint. On this night, it was a flawed formula.

The Kings, who took a page out of Miami's defensive playbook during the offseason and decided to prioritize the interior protection over that of the perimeter, collapsed on Howard down low while picking the lesser of two evils in deciding to let the Lakers hit 12 of 26 threes. Metta World Peace, who is shooting 36% from three-point range while taking an average of 6.2 per game, is considered key in that regard. Reserve shooting guard Jodie Meeks, who was seen as a key offseason signing but never gained Brown's trust or consistent playing time, will play a more prominent role as well.

As Dan D'Antoni sees it, Gasol will be the Lakers' version of Boris Diaw when he was a versatile playmaker and scorer for his brother's Suns. He'll spend more time on the outside so Howard can work in the post. That's the plan, anyways – one that has barely been put into place.

"You don't try to change everything," D'Antoni said. "It's just little by little, and you keep reinforcing it. Right now, they're thinking a little bit about how to do things, and we've just got to make sure we create good habits and then habits will come to reactions and then they'll be fine. But it's one of those things where we started in a hole – we're in a little bit of a hole now, and we have high aspirations. So every day, we just have to supply the energy. It might not look pretty, but the energy has got to be there."

If not, then the losses – and dashed championship dreams - surely will.