In case you’re somehow unaware of the complete failure that has been the Lakers’ season, here’s the update: despite signing LeBron James, the Lakers have a 30-35 record and essentially a zero percent chance of making the playoffs. Current ESPN modeling predicts that the Lakers will win 37 games this year. If that holds true, they will have signed one of the greatest players the world has ever seen and gotten... two wins more than last year. What a trainwreck.
LeBron was hurt for part of the season, sure. They’re still 24-23 in games with him, which also wouldn’t be enough to make the playoffs if you stretch it out into the full season. He’s been great offensively: 27 points, nine rebounds, eight assists per game? Not too shabby.
But his defense has been appalling, frankly. LeBron frequently just stands around on the defensive end, leaving wide-open shooters as he “assesses the situation.”
It’s gotten so bad that it even stands out in a group of other bad defenders. Former Ute Kyle Kuzma is a sieve, but even he was offended when LeBron didn’t close out on a shooter in a must-win game against the Clippers last week: He physically shoved LeBron toward the open man.
But while LeBron’s effort is a problem, maybe it’s because he took a look at the roster around him. It’s just a mess. You can split it up into two groups: Young players who have proved themselves to be heavily flawed, and veteran signings that were transparently dumb from the moment they were conceived.
We’ll tackle the first group first: Kuzma and Brandon Ingram can score, but both are very excited to do so in me-first, isolation, ball-stopping, offense-ruining sort of way. Neither can defend. Lonzo Ball has the opposite problem: he can’t score, and so his vision and defense isn’t quite enough to add up to an above-average starting point guard. Josh Hart has disappointed in his second year.
But oh boy, it’s that second group that reveals the true incompetence of the Laker franchise. The Lakers basketball brain trust — led by Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka — made decisions on veteran signings like they were trying to acquire memes, not wins. Javale McGee is a laughingstock of the league and wildly exploitable on defense, Lance Stephenson plays like the guy in your local pickup game who lacks talent so he overcompensates with uncontrolled effort, and Rajon Rondo famously doesn’t try until the playoffs.
The inevitable defense used — “this was the best talent we could acquire on one-year deals, thus saving cap space for the summer of 2019!” — looks awfully inadequate when one considers that the Lakers could have signed Brook Lopez, starting center with a remarkable 3-point stroke on the best team in basketball, to the same salary slot used to sign Michael Beasley, who now has found himself once again playing in China.
That these signings weren’t good enough was very, very, very obvious to everyone when they happened. Johnson and Pelinka somehow thought they were the best option. "We had spent months and months studying film, doing analytics, doing background on guys,” Pelinka told SpectrumSN.
If your analytics department tells you that Beasley, Rondo, McGee and Stephenson are your preferable signings, you found your analytics department drunk at a bar. That’s appropriate for the Lakers, who, for a majority of this decade, gainfully employed a scout nicknamed “Chaz The Bartender,” due to his having much more experience drinking at the bar than in the basketball world.
"Evaluating basketball talent is not too difficult,” the Lakers’ Jim Buss, former vice president of basketball operations, told Sports Illustrated. “If you grabbed 10 fans out of a bar and asked them to rate prospects, their opinions would be pretty much identical to those of the pro scouts.”
Remarkably, the Lakers may have made better personnel decisions in the Chaz era.
Luke Walton will be the first fall guy here, and while that’s a little unfair, his X’s and O’s and rotations are legitimately uninspiring. But the rumored replacements are Jason Kidd and Mark Jackson, two coaches who were last found somehow holding back the Bucks — this year’s best team in the NBA — and the Warriors — perhaps the greatest team of all time. You couldn’t name two more awful candidates.
It’s early yet in the basketball operations careers of Johnson and Pelinka. So far, they’ve acted like they the smartest guys in the room while all they’ve done is have the good fortune of working for the closest franchise to LeBron’s Hollywood production company. Lakers Exceptionalism has turned to Lakers Amateurism.
That’s the thing: Johnson has been a very successful businessman after his playing career finished, James has made himself one even while he still plays and is fascinating to talk to. Pelinka was one of the NBA’s top agents for a long time. These people are smart.
So why do they keep making dumb decisions?
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