MILWAUKEE — The Los Angeles Lakers made Deandre Ayton a T-shirt, one where the front is half his face and half the face of a lion. A shirt that has his name, his number and the Bahamian flag on the back.
Ayton’s proudly shown it off inside the team’s locker room over the past few weeks. Saturday, he beamed with pride when he saw his head coach, JJ Redick, wearing the shirt underneath his jacket when he got off the team bus and in his pregame news conference.
“We just want him to be a lion,” Redick said before Saturday’s win against the Milwaukee Bucks. “That’s all. We want him to be a lion.”
After his fifth game this year with at least 20 points and 10 rebounds, this one where he defended Giannis Antetokounmpo and helped the Lakers beat the Bucks 119-95 on the second night of a back-to-back, no one should’ve been all that surprised when Ayton wanted to roar — strangely enough when he was asked about that T-shirt.
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Athletic, Ayton spewed passion with profanity. He stared at his reputation. He wrapped his mind around old and new expectations. He shouted in anger. He reflected quietly about being accepted. He raged, retreated and raged again.
It lasted a little more than three minutes.
“I’m going to say some real-ass s—,” he told The Athletic.
How much of it was actually real? Hard to say.
He seemed sincere when he acknowledged the conversations around him when he joined the Lakers this summer after being bought out by the Portland Trail Blazers to conclude a choppy stint that followed a Phoenix Suns era undercut by his reputation as the No. 1 pick in the same 2018 draft class as … Luka Dončić.
“They say if this s— don’t work out for me, this is my last year,” he said. “Everybody and they mama have been saying that.”
He sounded angry when he said that if the Lakers were, say, 4-9 instead of 10-4, no one would care at all about the lion on the shirt or anything else Ayton was doing. They’d all be focused on what he isn’t.
“I keep my anger to myself,” he said after yelling the previous two sentences.
He said he was genuinely confused why the Lakers’ brass, Rob Pelinka and Redick, are calling him a lion. “I’m DominAyton,” he said, pointing to his nickname.
But at the end of the weaving in and out of emotions, Ayton seemingly landed on the most important truth, the message the Lakers have been trying to get across to him and the one that’s truly landed.
“Love who love you. That’s it. Love who love you,” he said.
The Lakers — who have sought elevated center play since trading Anthony Davis — are showing Ayton a lot of love. And he’s giving a lot back, the Lakers needing every bit of it.
“We need the best version of him for us to be as good as we can be,” Austin Reaves told The Athletic. “If he’s that, then we can be a really good team. If he’s not, I still think with talent, we can win some games. But for us to be what we want to be, we need him to be the best version of himself every game.”
Deandre Ayton, wearing his custom-made T-shirt during pregame, finished with 20 points and 10 rebounds in the Los Angeles Lakers’ 119-95 win over the Milwaukee Bucks on Saturday. (Dan Woike / The Athletic)
Midway through the second quarter of the Lakers’ win, Dončić drew a double-team and found Ayton slicing down the right side of the paint. As he caught the ball and looked toward the basket, there wasn’t a defender in sight.
But as he went to lay the ball in with his right hand, Antetokounmpo came from his blind spot and swatted the ball off the backboard.
Later on the sideline, Ayton and Reaves talked about the play, the Lakers guard sharing his strategy for navigating world-wrecking defenders like Antetokounmpo. As the two Lakers talked about the right reads and the process for quickly dissecting where a high-impact defender is lurking and how to exploit him, it clicked.
“If you identify where the problem’s gonna come from, then you can forget about the reads and just know what you’re gonna do. You just make it simple,” Reaves explained.
“He was like, ‘Nobody’s ever told me that. Nobody’s ever told me to analyze before, before I do this or that.’ And he was like, ‘Thank you.’ Legit, he was like, ‘Thank you.’”
Through 14 games this season, it’s been largely agenda-less basketball for the Lakers and their center. After the Phoenix and Portland eras, Ayton came to Los Angeles with lots to prove — and disprove.
“It’s unfortunate that the world works this way, that you hear things about people before you’re around ’em, that people try to paint a narrative of character. The best thing you could do is … you have to be your own judge of character towards people these days,” Reaves said. “The things that you hear, the things that I heard about him, was that he wasn’t coachable, moody, and it’s been completely opposite.”
The Lakers locker room is like a stage, and Ayton was in the middle of it, completely in the spotlight pregame Saturday night. The music is blaring, but he’s not happy; Ayton grabbed the tablet that controls the room’s music. He and Jake LaRavia began talking about that one NBA YoungBoy song that sounds like that other NBA YoungBoy song that neither knew the name of.
So, Ayton went rogue and did his own thing.
For the second straight game, an hour prior to tipoff, The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Medley” boomed through the team’s portable speaker. Ayton, with Austin Reaves and others watching, started to preach to no one in particular.
“They said this my last chance,” he yelled over the part in the song when Bobby Hatfield sings “I need your love.”
Later, he played “Lean on Me” while telling his teammates that he needed every one of them. Then, “Stand by Me” as he shouted at the group that, even on the second night of a back-to-back, that they needed to “wake the f— up.”
“Might as well leave it on the line,” he said.
There was total freedom in his movement, plenty of volume in his voice and no resistance or judgment from anyone sitting in front of his locker.
It was a wild energy — but one he’d back up on the court. The Lakers are 6-0 when he’s grabbed 10 rebounds and scored at least 10 points. Friday in New Orleans, he was a plus-35. Saturday, he had 20 points, 10 rebounds, two steals and a block in a plus-12 outing against the Bucks.
“He feeds off of the group’s energy, and he feeds off of empowerment and encouragement and positive reinforcement,” Redick said after the win in Milwaukee. “It took eight to 10 days to figure that out in the preseason. And once we did, it’s been really awesome to watch him grow with this group and be fully engaged and be a part of this group.”
Saturday night, Ayton was totally engaged. As he laughed and yelled and raged and joked, he was a ball of emotions and zero fear of expressing the full spectrum of his feelings.
“I’’m against the whole world,” he said at one point. “That’s what y’all don’t get.”
This, Ayton knows, is certainly not true. Maybe he’s fueled by a chip on his shoulder from the perceptions about what he is and isn’t willing to do to help a team win. Maybe he feels unfairly cast as a locker-room distraction or as player who has squandered potential. And maybe that does make him angry.
But Ayton, through 14 games with the Lakers, knows whatever he’s up against, it’s certainly not him going at it alone.
So about that shirt, about all that love the Lakers have been pouring into their center, Ayton feels it.
“I came in here,” he said, “and the Lakers did this (spreading his arms out wide for a hug) ‘DA, we love you.’”
