Los Angeles Lakers will be in elite company after first 25 games

The Los Angeles Lakers are the best team in basketball thus far in the 2019-2020 season and things are only going to get better over the next 11 games.

The Los Angeles Lakers have not only proven that they are legitimate title contenders this season but have been the best team in the NBA to start the year. Through 14 games at the time of writing this, the Lakers hold a 12-2 record, the best in the NBA.

The next best team is the Milwaukee Bucks with a 12-3 record. The Boston Celtics are the only other team with more than 10 wins this early in this season.

It is important that we do not get too far ahead of ourselves, however, as the Lakers are yet to have that signature win over a really good team this season. The team’s best win this season is over the 10-3 Miami Heat while they also have two impressive wins over the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks.

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However, outside of those three, the other nine wins for the Lakers have not been all that special. The combined record of teams that the Lakers have beaten this season is 74-97 (.433); when you remove the Heat, Jazz and Mavericks, that the combined record is 46-84 (.354).

But hey, the Lakers play who is put in front of them and you cannot criticize the team for that, we just want fans to avoid getting too lofty of expectations. Things will be tougher.

Luckily for those fans, though, the immediate future also presents a smooth road. In fact, after the Lakers’ first 25 games of the season, they are likely going to have a record that starts getting put into historical context.

In order, the teams the Lakers play over the next 11 games are the Thunder, Grizzlies, Spurs, Pelicans, Wizards, Mavericks, Nuggets, Jazz, Trail Blazers, Timberwolves and Magic. The first five teams in that stretch are under .500 with the best team being the 6-9 Pelicans.

The Lakers should win all of those games and for the sake of this article and determining what is possible, we will assume that they win those games. They haven’t given us any reason to think that they won’t beat up on those bad teams.

That gives the Lakers a 17-2 record before hitting a tough stretch. The Mavericks, Nuggets, Jazz and Trail Blazers are all talented teams. However, the Lakers have already beaten the Mavericks and the Jazz and Portland have wildly underperformed thus far this year at 5-11.

Realistically, they should win three of those four and that is not even being overly optimistic. At worst they go 1-3 in that stretch, but I highly doubt they go any worse than 2-2. A 3-1 run in that stretch gives the team a 20-3 record.

Finally, the Lakers have a young team that has floated around .500 this year in the Minnesota Timberwolves and a 6-8 Orlando team that has no real star. As long as the Lakers play as they have all season, those should both be wins.

That gives us a record of 22-3 on the upside with the floor being 20-5. The fact that the floor is 20-5 is astonishing. To put this in perspective, the best team in the league last season on December 12 (the day after the Lakers’ 25th game) was the 23-7 Raptors.

Only four teams have had a winning percentage of .880 or higher on December 12 this century: the 2007 Celtics, 2008 Celtics, 2014 Warriors and 2015 Warriors. It is safe to say that the 2019 Los Angeles Lakers will be in some elite company.