Los Angeles Lakers are not as far away from contention as believed
By Jason Reed
The Los Angeles Lakers missed the playoffs in LeBron James’ first year on the team, which has left a negative aura around the team moving forward.
When the Los Angeles Lakers signed LeBron James on the first day of free agency last year the expectations for the Los Angeles Lakers skyrocketed.
The young core that was already in LA was showing positive signs the year before and appeared to be a much more talented team without LeBron than the Cleveland Cavaliers were. Not only that, but there were also hopes and realistic expectations for the Lakers to sign a second superstar.
That is when things started to go wrong as the team could not secure Paul George, the star that had been so strongly tied to the Lakers beforehand.
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But it was OK, the Lakers still had the best player on the planet and a nice core around him. Sure, the free agent signings were quirky and proved to not be that great but this would at least be a playoff team, right?
Well, wrong. The Lakers missed the playoffs in non-dramatic fashion and suddenly the opinion on James and this front office has soured drastically. Not many people expect much from the Lakers moving forward, either, as even Paul Pierce said the team “needs a lot” to contend in the near future.
Do the Los Angeles Lakers need to make improvements? Absolutely. This current team is not a title contender. However, are the Lakers as bad off as everyone thinks? Absolutely not.
Literally everything that could have possibly gone wrong for the Lakers this season went wrong. The injuries stacked up and trade talks got leaked to create tension in the locker room.
In terms of depth, this is probably the most talented the league has ever been. The Lakers were not going to stay afloat with these outside circumstances weighing them down with the massive riptide that is the Western Conference. LeBron no longer had the weak East to help him at least get to the playoffs and go from there.
Because at the end of the day, the threesome of LeBron, Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball were pretty good on the court together. In an 82-game season, the Lakers only had their three best players on the court at the same time for 23 games. The team went 15-8 in those games.
For those at home wondering, that is a 53-win pace across 82 games and this far in the season would have made them the third seed in the West.
And it is safe to say that the Lakers could have kept up that trend as well. The team started rather slow and started to kick up steam with the trio, which peaked with a blowout win over the Golden State Warriors on Christmas, which ironically is when the team started spiraling down because of LeBron’s injury.
Ingram missed about two weeks in December prior to LeBron’s injury. The Lakers were 5-1 in the last six games played with the trio all playing.
Each guy brings their own dynamic to the table and missing just one of them at a time hurt the team. And while there is a chance that one of the younger guys gets traded this offseason, we at least have comfort knowing that will be a talent upgrade, which hopefully will lead to results.
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It is easy to hate the Los Angeles Lakers, anyone that is not a Laker fan pretty much does. However, at the end of the day, the team was still better at full strength than a lot of people would like to admit. There is always next year!