Because LeBron James hurt his ankle and couldn’t play, the Los Angeles Lakers needed Anthony Davis to have a big game against the Utah Jazz on Saturday night.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the Lakers got. Davis had a terrible game on offense, and the Jazz won 132–125 at the Delta Center.

It was important for the Jazz to double-team Davis early and often, which made him have to make plays. That had some good and some bad effects. Davis had his second career triple-double, with 15 points, 15 boards, 11 assists, one steаl, and four blocks. There’s more to the story than that number, though. Davis only made 5 of 21 shots from the field and caused 6 of the Lakers’ 12 mistakes.

Davis had a showing that wasn’t like him, so Austin Reaves defended him, even though he knew what would be said about the big man, via Spectrum SportsNet:

“Yeah, I can already see the headlines: ‘AD sucks’ or ‘AD can’t do this to that.'” He had a tough night hitting the ball, but he was great in every other way. You said he had 11 assists, and a triple-double, and from the start they were doubling him up. He was making the right play, and I promise that if you watch the film again, you will do the same thing if we gave him the ball in the same spots where he missed shots. I thought he played a great game, even though he had trouble hitting the ball.

This was Davis’s first bad game in a long time because he has been on a tear lately. Ahead of the game, Davis is very hard оn himself, so Lakers head coach Darvin Ham gave him some words of support through Spectrum SportsNet:

“He’s too hard оn himself.” There were some shots he took that went right where he wаnted them to. Was unfortunate to lose some mistakes. We were all telling him to keep going, and I could not stop telling him that. It shows how special he is to call 15-15-11 ordinary. The four blocked shots were just him being out there and continuing to play. 13 defensive rebounds, even though he was having a bad night. You have to keep going. It’s too bad that Bron isn’t involved; it’s also a bad time. But good for him. He kept up the figҺt as much as he could, made himself available for us, and stayed busy on defense, making plays for his teammates that led to 11 assists.

People are hoping that Davis’s bad game was an outlier and that he will be back to being his normal powerful self in the Lakers’ next game, especially if James keeps missing time.

Anthony Davis says he is to blame for the Lakers’ loss to the Jazz.

Davis has always been one to take responsibility for bad games, and he did that again after the loss to the Jazz.