Los Angeles Lakers: How LA matches up against the best in the West
By Jason Reed
The Los Angeles Lakers are ready to make a run for the NBA Championship this season but have to get through a tough Western Conference first.
The Los Angeles Lakers are legitimate title contenders for the first time in what feels like forever this season and are ready to restore the prestige that the franchise has been lacking over the past half-decade.
The Lakers have highly disappointed as the most decorated team in the league over in that span. The Lakers have missed the playoffs six years in a row, which is more times than the franchise had in its entirety leading up to this stretch.
But with LeBron James getting a running mate in Anthony Davis, the Los Angeles Lakers are locked and loaded and looking forward to the 2019 season. The team started with a huge bang as they blew out the Golden State Warriors in the first preseason game of the year.
Granted, it is just the preseason, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
It does show that this is a Laker team that is not only immensely talented but is here to take care of business. Unfortunately for them, the NBA is now much more balanced than it has been in the past several years as there is a slew of teams that have a legitimate chance of winning it all.
Most of those teams are in the stacked Western Conference, which the Lakers have to go through. Once it gets into the playoffs, matchups can dictate the outcome, especially when the talent gap is not that large.
With that in mind, we decided to break down how the Lakers match up against the best teams in the Western Conference. Here is how LA matches up against the rest of the top four in the West (which they are a part of).