Yahoo Lifestyle Lakers coach Frank Vogel won't play LeBron James much this preseason, doesn't want to 'overdo it'
Frank Vogel is going to take things slow with LeBron James this fall.
Vogel, the Los Angeles Lakers’ new coach, isn’t planning to play much of James at all this preseason — not wanting to risk his star’s health before the season even starts.
And coming off a year where James played a career-low 55 games due to injury, the move is probably a good one.
“We want to be intelligent,” Vogel said, via ESPN. “We want to get him enough reps to get him familiar with his teammates and get everybody on the same page, some cohesiveness. But certainly going to be intelligent and not overdo it in the preseason.”
The Lakers will have six exhibition games — including two in China against the Brooklyn Nets — before their season opener next month against the Los Angeles Clippers.
Until then, Vogel said the main plan is to stick James and center Anthony Davis together as much as possible in order to improve their chemistry. While he does that, he’s also tinkering with the starting lineup.
According to ESPN, James and Davis’ team with Dwight Howard, Avery Bradley and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope meshed extremely well together on Sunday.
“We saw a mismatch in LeBron and Anthony's team really sort of had their way with the other teams,” Vogel said, via ESPN. “We had three teams out there, and those guys really performed at a high level on both ends of the floor.”
Even though they’re just days into training camp, Vogel is more than ready to get started.
With what he’s seen so far, he knows his team is ready to go.
“I feel like we’re ready to play right now,” Voegl said, via ESPN. “We put a lot of stuff in, both offensively with our full offense and the variety of things you can do out of it, as well as a lot of our defensive coverages.
“We’ve had a really productive first couple of days, and I’m not worried about us not being ready to play games against Golden State or in China.”
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