I think the same thing is happening to the Lakers. When the season first started, they were "Amped!", "Ready to Go!", "Over Take Jordan!", .... you know what I mean. They were beating teams left and right from the start. Then all of a sudden losses to the Nuggets and Suns brought them back from they're season starting honey moon high. In my opinion, that's when the Lakers demise started. Although they won the next 5 games, I could see their intensity slowly starting to dip, then came their 4 game losing streak to Utah, Indiana, Memphis, and Houston. That four game losing streak was a the lowest point so far however I have yet to see a great performance by this LA squad since November really.
This team has been so used to playing with no sense of urgency that when it's time to show up, nothing happens. A perfect example was the game with San Antonio. It was their opportunity to show everybody that they're still the team of the West. When the game first started things were looking great, they jumped out to a 16-11 lead and were playing with some serious fire. However they were unable to sustain that intensity, and fell apart late in the game. They just don't know how to play the entire game full throttle thats not an NBA championship.
But tactically I think the biggest problem with the Lakers is that they've stopped playing team basketball. Almost every offensive possession I've seen from them lately has basically been 1 on 1 plays. This will get it done against crap teams but against good teams this type of strategy won't. The Lakers this season has a total of 2 wins over teams with winning records (Hornets and Chicago). The reason the Lakers were playing so well was that they were moving the basketball beautifully getting opponents to shift continuously. As good as Kobe Bryant is, the offense starts with Pau Gasol. We all remember this Laker team without Gasol *face in palms*. When Gasol stopped playing aggressively and starting settling for outside jumpers and not attacking the basket, that's when things started to go downhill for the Lakers. After his maturation last year in the NBA finals I thought finally he had broken through to go on and become a completely dominate player. But actually the complete opposite has occurred, he's gone back to being "soft", if you will, and now Kobe Bryant is going back to his old self of hogging the ball on every offensive possession.
The Lakers still have plenty of time to get back to where they need to be. But one thing they don't want to miss out on is home court advantage. I believe this, if the Lakers don't finish with the 1 seed in the West they won't be repeating as NBA champs.
