Predictions that the Los Angeles Lakers would miss the playoffs were seen as risqué mid-season when Anthony Davis suffered another injury, Russell Westbrook’s inefficiencies were blatant and LeBron James bore too great a burden for a 19-year veteran short before a brutal second stood -halftime.
All remain true, and it feels inevitable that the Lakers will miss the playoffs. Worse still, James sustained what he described as a “horrible” ankle injury in Sunday’s loss to the New Orleans Pelicans. Lakers coach Frank Vogel called James a doubt for Tuesday’s game against the Dallas Mavericks.
The Lakers (31-43) may not even make the play-in tournament. They are clinging to 10th place in the Western Conference, just a game ahead of the San Antonio Spurs for the final play-in spot. They split their season streak, and the Spurs currently own the tiebreaker by a superior conference record.
It’s not like the Lakers are trying to lose. Their first-round draft pick belongs to New Orleans if they finish with a top-10 record, Memphis otherwise. They currently have the ninth-worst record in the league.
They were so bad and it could get worse.
Six of the Lakers’ last eight games are against the West’s top six seeds, and that doesn’t include a rematch against the ninth-place Pelicans, who will doubly benefit from Los Angeles missing the playoffs.
The status of Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James for Tuesday’s game against the Dallas Mavericks is in doubt. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
The Spurs, meanwhile, play the ground-eating Houston Rockets on Monday and will host a two-game set against the tanking Portland Trail Blazers over the weekend. Spurs manager Gregg Popovich would relish the opportunity to edge out his long-time postseason rivals and three wins might be all he needs to do that.
The Lakers are 5-11 against teams staying on their schedule. The Spurs are 7-12.
Davis just completed his first workout six weeks after spraining his right metatarsal. He has played ten games since mid-December when he suffered a sprained left cruciate ligament. Even before that, he fell far short of expectations. There’s no telling how much, if anything, Davis can help over the next two weeks.
The story goes on
James leads the NBA with 30.1 points per game and ranks third among all players with his 37.2 minutes per night. He’s 37 and has exceeded 40 minutes in five of his last nine games, including 42 minutes in Sunday’s collapse against the Pelicans, most of which came after his ankle injury. This concerns the territory.
The Lakers have a negative net rating in meaningful minutes, whether or not James or Davis were in the lineup this season. They are outperformed at 6.6 points per 100 possessions when neither enters the court – an efficiency level of the bottom six. Force one or both to play the equivalent of playoff basketball with bad feet for the remainder of this season and the Lakers risk injuries that could further limit their chances next year.
The Lakers started Westbrook, Dwight Howard, Austin Reaves, Wenyen Gabriel and Stanley Johnson as James rested a sore left knee last week. Reaves is an undrafted rookie. Gabriel and Johnson didn’t appear on the NBA rosters before Christmas. Howard, the future Hall of Famer, is barely a player in his 18th season.
And Westbach? Only 16 times in NBA history has a regular rotation contributor posted a player efficiency rating less than 15 and a usage rate greater than 27 for a single season. Westbrook will join this group. Antoine Walker is the only player to ever achieve such a high level of inefficiency for a playoff team (the 2002-03 Boston Celtics). The last thing the Lakers want is to hand Westbrook the keys.
You may not have a choice. DJ Augustin, who signed March 1, is the only other available point guard on the roster aside from part-time ballhandler Malik Monk. Besides James, there’s no one left to trust. He’s in doubt now and Westbrook could be the Lakers’ best option a month after they tried to terminate his contract.
This could very well be the most disappointing season in Lakers history. The closest comparison is the 2012-13 issue, which featured Steve Nash and Howard on the infamous Sports Illustrated cover, which read, “Now this is about to get funny.” That team took 45.5 minutes per game from Kobe Bryant went through a six-win-seven-game stretch late in the season to reach the playoffs, which ended with his Achilles tendon rupture.
The Lakers missed the playoffs for the next six years. The arrival of James and Davis saved the franchise from ineptness for a season and won the 2020 championship in the bubble, but the Lakers are on a relegation course again — they lost in the first round last season and are still struggling at the end of this year for their playoff life.
Missing out on the play-in tournament would be an embarrassment for a team that includes a legendary player and four of the top 75 (plus Howard, who deserves to be on that list). But face it, going into play-in with 30 wins and needing two wins to make the playoffs isn’t something to write home about. The Lakers didn’t win straight games against the Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings on Jan. 4 and 7, and it hasn’t even been a year since James said of the play-in, “Whoever came up with that , must be fired .”
Now it’s his only chance, and even that glimmer of hope is fading every day. According to FiveThirtyEight predictions, the Spurs now have twice as many chances of making the playoffs as the Lakers. Imagine. LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard – underdogs from afar.
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Ben Rohrbach is a senior editor at Yahoo Sports. Do you have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach