If the Los Angeles Lakers made anything clear about the 2022 trade deadline, it’s this: They don’t want to do what it takes to fix this. That disaster of a season, that two-year attempt to bring down a champion, that decade of nepotism, and the terrible basketball it’s largely spawned. Neither are issues that Lakers management seemed all too interested in solving. They were problems the Lakers hoped would fix themselves.
ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne put it best in February when she argued that her interpretation of the team’s inaction “was that, from ownership down, the Lakers organization basically decided, ‘You guys got into this . This is the bed you made. LeBron [James]Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, all future Hall of Famers, this is your choice of roster and team, make it work.'”
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Well they didn’t get it to work. On Tuesday, the Phoenix Suns ended the Lakers’ season for the second straight season. They didn’t even wait until postseason this time. They knocked the Lakers out of contention for a meager play-in position with almost a week left in the regular season. The Lakers, preseason favorites in the Western Conference, can’t finish better than 11th overall.
And their front office wasn’t willing to do anything about it. Your pick for the first round of 2027? Apparently locked at close of trade. Chin up Lakers fans. This rookie will be of great help to James when he arrives a few months before LeBron’s 43rd birthday. It turned out that adding extra luxury tax dollars to an already bloated payroll was unthinkable. You just can’t ask a Lakers franchise with an estimated $3 billion local television deal to outspend the big Milwaukee Bucks. Their idea for a solution was to take over the 34-year-old journeyman DJ Augustin. He didn’t score in the season-ending loss to Phoenix.
That loss was probably for the best in the end. After all, those same Suns would have been waiting for the Lakers in the first round if they somehow managed to squeeze through to the playoffs. The Lakers would have lost that streak, and they would have lost it badly, but just getting there would have given that front office an excuse, a myth of momentum. Sure, her season would have ended the same way, but with just enough momentum to warrant further inaction. We have now seen where inaction leads this team.
No, the Lakers should be ashamed. They had to end that season in such a humiliating way that the franchise rulers could no longer ignore how badly they had let it happen. Any notion that they could have the same nonchalant attitude that bled their trading deadline into the off-season needed to be erased here and now. There is no momentum here. There are no positive aspects to build on. There is a fundamentally broken team that needs quick and decisive action from putative organizational leaders to fix.
That probably means something different to you than it means to Jeanie Buss. Everyone involved should admit that a change of coach is necessary. It seems unlikely that the front office that failed Frank Vogel would be similarly held accountable, but any leeway it might have had to slow-play a rebuild is dwindling. Buss fired her own brother in 2017, and unlike his successors, James was never included in his years in the lottery. The Rob Pelinka-led Braintrust has now wasted three of their four seasons in purple and gold. He has now missed the playoffs as often in the past four years as in his first 15 years. Apparently he would rather end his career in Los Angeles. He used the All-Star break to indicate he’s open to a move.
If he plays in two of the team’s last three games, which isn’t a given given the lack of appearances, there’s a good chance he’ll win the Scorer title at 37. Even after almost two decades in the NBA, he’s still a viable centerpiece for a champion. Davis, when he’s healthy, is a trusted sidekick. These are the only two components of this roster that played a significant role next season.
The Westbrook experiment failed. So is the rostering philosophy that represented his adoption. The Lakers can’t just stack big names and hope their star power will overcome a poor fit. James is wasted next to a point guard who neither shoots nor defends. He and Davis can’t run a 10-player roster on minimum wage. The entire blueprint needs to be rewritten.
And that would only ever happen from below. The Lakers never wanted to have to fix that. They don’t want to spend whatever it takes in terms of dollars or picks to give James and Davis another realistic shot at winning a championship. To be honest, maybe not yet. But if anything would motivate the Lakers to look in the mirror and reevaluate the way they do business, it would miss the playoffs. This season wasn’t just a miserable failure. It was an embarrassment. It was positive proof that the things this organization believes in no longer win basketball games. Things it takes to get this bad. Now it’s only up.