Luka Dončić against the Minnesota Timberwolves felt like one of the safer bets in the entire playoff field. He played them a year ago. It didn't end well for Minnesota. The Dallas Mavericks sent them home in five games. Dončić averaged 32.4 points in that series. He subjected Rudy Gobert to another year of taunts when he drew the switch on the final possession of Game 2 and cooked the Defensive Player of the Year for a game-winning 3-pointer. Dončić kept Minnesota out of the NBA Finals a year ago. Surely he'd torch the Timberwolves again, right? Well ... yes and no. Dončić did score 37 points in Saturday's Game 1, but his new team, the Los Angeles Lakers, lost in a 117-95 blowout. If you're looking for an immediate explanation of why, consider two of the most important teammates Dončić had last postseason: Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford. Dončić dished out 41 assists in last year's Western Conference finals, and more than half of them (22) went to his two centers. Of those 22, 10 came on a single pass type, a lob, which is arguably the best pass in Dončić's arsenal. Now think of the roster Dončić currently plays for. The only center to consistently play is Jaxson Hayes, who isn't nearly as good as Gafford or Lively in basically any respect. He played eight minutes in Game 1. The Lakers lost those minutes by 11 points. They played the rest of the game without a center. Dončić dished out only a single assist. It was just the second time in his career he'd been held to one dime in a playoff game. Suddenly, what happened on Saturday makes a bit more sense. At the trade deadline, the Lakers very nearly acquired a new starting center in Charlotte Hornets big man Mark Williams. They nixed the deal over his physical. Only time will tell if that was the right decision in the grand scheme of things. We don't know how healthy Williams will be in five years. We don't know what center the Lakers will add this offseason. There are just too many variables here to make any long-term declaration. In the short-term, though, Game 1 made plain just how badly the Lakers miss having even a single reliable big man. The absence was felt in all of the ways you'd expect. They were out-rebounded 42-33 during the competitive portion of the game, and they allowed 23 second-chance points, which would have ranked dead last in the league if it a was a full-season average. They were outscored in the paint 42-30 before garbage time as well, and the Timberwolves themselves noticed the lack of any meaningful deterrent at the basket. "I just noticed at certain times when they had no rim-protector in the game, when Jaxson Hayes wasn't on the court," said 6-foot-9 Jaden McDaniels, who scored 25 points and had four offensive rebounds in the win. "I mean if he's not on the court I'm basically the tallest person out there." If Hayes were more reliable when it came to positional defending and had better hands to catch those lobs Dončić likes to throw, JJ Redick might be able to trust him for more than eight minutes. Obviously, in Game 1 at least, he didn't. Those lost assists are where the Lakers feel their size deficiencies most, though. The Timberwolves racked up almost twice as many of them, 29 to 15. Sure, some of that was due to Minnesota's outlier 3-point shooting. They aren't going to make half of their 3s again. But the Lakers didn't exactly shoot poorly, either. They made 15 triples in Game 1. They did that 31 times in the regular season and went 20-11 in those games. They were blown out on Saturday, and it makes sense in the context of the roster they have and the one they're facing. The Lakers are built to overwhelm opponents with shot-creation. Stopping Dončić requires a ton of defensive resources. Committing that many makes it even harder to slow down LeBron James and Austin Reaves. Having those three players should mean always being able to create advantages and find mismatches. Dončić did that nearly singlehandedly with the Mavericks last year. Those big men were a big part of it. Containing him as a driver frequently meant rotating a big man up to meet him, thus taking him away from the lob he'd ideally be protecting against. Either Dončić gets an easy bucket or his center does. Without that center on the floor, Dončić becomes predictable. His passes, almost universally, are going to 3-point shooters. The Lakers have high-end shot-creation, but the shooting itself? Not especially imposing. They ranked 19th in 3-point attempts per game and 14th in 3-point percentage. He's not collapsing defenses in quite the same way without that dangerous center. That, in turn, makes it harder to force the defense into rotation, and to give James and Reaves their own opportunities to punish mismatches. All of this led to a 95-point outing that just offers no plausible path to victory. The Lakers don't have Anthony Davis anymore. They aren't built to win slugfests. Their goal is to use their star ball-handlers to find and torture your weakest defenders. That's not going to be easy without a center to force those impossible choices. The Timberwolves had the sixth-best defense in the NBA. They're relatively stout if they can stick with their base defense. Are there solves here? Not obvious ones. James has been a very effective pick-and-roll big man in the past, especially for Kyrie Irving in Cleveland, but the Lakers haven't honed the Dončić-James two-man dance all that much yet, and even if they had, James finishes with strength and craft. He doesn't have the catch radius that Gafford or Lively do, and Dončić's speciality is throwing passes only his enormous centers can catch. Jarred Vanderbilt doesn't have good enough hands to play that role. None of this addresses the Gobert problem. If the Lakers put any remotely unreliable shooter on the floor, the Timberwolves will just put Gobert on that player so he's free to play as much help defense at the rim as he wants. These are pretty fixable issues with an offseason. It might be as simple as "go get a center." But for now, Saturday was a reminder of just how hastily this team was put together. The Lakers didn't plan to go into the playoffs this way. Circumstances demanded it. Now Dončić is facing the Timberwolves with an entirely different sort of supporting cast than he had a year ago, and that's going to demand an entirely different sort of game plan to attack them. Dončić and James are two of the smartest players in NBA history. Reaves isn't far behind, and Redick was a creative adjuster in the regular season. If there's a solution here, they'll find it. But whatever it is, it's probably going to have to be more conventional than last year's approach of just throwing it to the tall guy.