The Lakers had their mini-camp and Anthony Davis is already impressing

Officially, the Lakers season will kick off next week with the start of preseason, training camp and media day. But, as has become tradition under LeBron James, the team unofficially kicks off its season in the days leading up to training camp with their minicamp.

In previous years, those camps typically took part in Las Vegas, but the Lakers took the relatively short trip to San Diego instead this year. Videos of them leaving one of their workouts surfaced on Twitter over last weekend.

And if you needed any more confirmation, Austin Reaves himself talked about the mini-camp during his appearance on Tuesday on The Lowe Post podcast hosted by Zach Lowe of ESPN. Very interestingly, Reaves provided some detail about the camp including the apparent hot shooting from Anthony Davis(!).

“We went down to San Diego. We got down Thursday, had a dinner Thursday night. Then Friday, Saturday were workouts, practice. Not really practice but just getting in the gym, doing a lot of 5-on-0 stuff, running over, basically, foundation stuff. Doing a little bit of playing here and there but not much. Coaches are there but it’s basically player-ran. It was great. It was 100% attendance. Everybody was there. Everybody was active and everybody looked good.

We did a lot of shooting competition stuff. AD is shooting the ball really well right now. It’s something I’ve tried to get him to do more is shoot it because if he does that at a very decent level, which he can because in the bubble year he shot it really well, literally you can’t guard him. But just the whole weekend it was good. We had dinners and stuff and an opportunity for everyone to learn one another and get closer.”

Davis’ shooting in the bubble has been, and may forever be, one of the most inexplicable things that happened in that playoff run. After flashing a legitimate jumper during those 21 games, he’s never truly come close to replicating that and, last season, simply opted not to do it and lived far more around the rim. It was a strategy that ended in success, but still with a sense of wonder attached to it.

There’s always a “what if” element to the Lakers offense, though, because of that one playoff run from Davis. It’s a narrative that will follow him around and, ideally, he’d be able to find that form.

Hopefully, though, this is the season we finally get a glimpse of it once again.

You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.