What's behind this stifling, confusing LeBron James-led Los Angeles Lakers defense - ESPN

SO MUCH WAS happening behind the scenes on Feb. 1 — when the Los Angeles Lakers' stunning trade for Luka Doncic was being consummated — that it was easy to miss what actually happened in the game that night.

The Lakers had defeated the Knicks 128-112 at Madison Square Garden behind a stout defensive effort without their best defensive player, Anthony Davis. The box score offered clues at how they'd done it: Knicks stars Jalen Brunson (16 points on 7-for-18 shooting) and Karl-Anthony Towns (17 on 3-for-12 shooting) had off nights, while role players such as Josh Hart (26 on 11-for-16 shooting) picked up the slack.

The next game, a 122-97 win over the Clippers, offered more evidence. James Harden shot 2-for-12 with just seven points. Kawhi Leonard went 4-for-11 for 11 points. Then came a 120-112 win over the Warriors in which Stephen Curry finished with 37 but was an atrocious 6-for-20 from behind the 3-point arc.

It was over the next four weeks, during a stretch in which the Lakers won 13 of 15 games and rocketed up the Western Conference standings, that coaches and scouts around the league began to examine that win over the Knicks for clues as to what the Lakers had been doing. They'd gone from the league's 20th best defense over the first three months of the season to first.

How did a team without its best defensive players hold Brunson and Towns to a combined 30% shooting? What about Harden and Leonard? Curry? Were these just bad nights? Or had the Lakers, with traditionally small lineups, concocted some sort of nontraditional scheme that could stifle the NBA's biggest stars?

ESPN analyst Kendrick Perkins posited that L.A. was simply conceding the 3-point shot and daring teams to shoot themselves out of games. Others