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“Keep talking about my squad, our personnel ages, the way he plays, he stays injured, we’re past our time in this league, etc etc etc. Do me one favor PLEASE!!!! And I mean PLEASE!!! Keep that same narrative ENERGY when it begins! That’s all I ask.” This was the message Los Angeles Lakers’ superstar and future Hall of Famer LeBron James sent out via twitter on Aug. 4, 2021 in responding to a wave of criticism from the NBA media regarding the then-new makeup of the Lakers, who were looking to win their second championship in three seasons after capturing the 2020 title.
The criticism that James was responding to at the time was largely targeted at a series of moves for aging, injury prone, past-their-prime, former NBA All-Stars to fill out their roster such as 37 year old Carmelo Anthony, 36 year old Dwight Howard, 36 year old Rajon Rondo, and 33 year old Russell Westbrook. The Lakers’ trade for Westbrook in particular was what drew much of the ire of the NBA intelligentsia.
Like the players listed before, Westbrook was – and still is – a future Hall of Famer, and unlike the players listed before, has an NBA MVP Award to his name (2016-17). His pedigree was – and still is – undeniable, and is likely what seduced LeBron to convince Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka to trade key rotation pieces from their 2020 championship team Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Kyle Kuzma to the Washington Wizards for the former MVP. What the James and the Lakers overlooked, however, was what almost every other NBA team and media member had realized over the past few years: Westbrook is a shell of the player he used to be, and is grossly overpaid (he makes nearly $50 million per year, enough to take up nearly half of any team’s cap space). Not only that, but one of the first concerns that was raised by prominent NBA media members such as The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and The Washington Post’s Ben Golliver was that Westbrook would be a horrible on-court fit with the roster that the Lakers were putting together.
LeBron and Westbrook are both players that need the ball in their hands the majority of the time in order for them to be most effective. With most of the above average shooters from their 2020 team (Kuzma, Caldwell-Pope, Alex Caruso, and more) shipped off elsewhere to make room for Westbrook, Anthony, Howard and more, serious questions were raised about how effectively, if at all, the Lakers would be able to space the floor with their starting lineup, which in addition to James and Westbrook was going to feature multiple-time all-star big man Anthony Davis, who is not much of a shooter either. Although James has developed into an effective outside shooter in the latter stage of his career, teams will always defend his ability to drive first and foremost. While James and Davis are average and below average shooters respectively, Westbrook has been a comically bad outside shooter for most of his career, and perhaps the bigger problem is despite his ability – or lack thereof – to shoot from beyond the arc, he still has attempted between three and seven three pointers per game over the past few seasons of his career, and plenty of other ill-advised, low percentage, long pull up two point shots.
Westbrook’s horrendous shooting numbers would have been less of an issue for Westbrook and the Lakers this season if Westbrook still possessed the otherworldly athleticism and ability to get to the rim that defined him in his prime on the Oklahoma City Thunder. That athleticism hasn’t been there in enough quantity for several years now, and is a large part of the reason that his stint with the Lakers this season was Westbrook’s fourth team in as many years (2018/19 was his last season in OKC, he spend 19/20 in Houston, and 20/21 in Washington). Now Westbrook regularly misses layups when he drives to the bucket, and is often times so out of control when he drives that he would have games this year where he would have more turnovers than assists, which is not what you want from a point guard you’re paying nearly $50 million per year on a team that had championship aspirations at the start of the year.
Despite all of the concerns raised before the season, James, Westbrook, Davis and the Lakers were confident that they could win a championship going into the season. Pelinka even told the team at a meeting before the season that they may be the greatest compilation of basketball talent ever on one team (a comical statement given the recent Golden State Warriors dynasty featuring Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green all in their primes). Most of the sports gambling books in Vegas were also high on the Lakers, giving them some of the best odds to win the Western Conference and the NBA Finals going into the season.
The reality of how 2021/22 went for LA was worse than anybody could have possibly predicted. Even those most dubious of the Lakers clunky, aging and injury prone roster figured that at worst they would finish around the 6th seed, and lose in the first or second round of the playoffs against either a dominant Phoenix Suns team or a resurgent Golden State Warriors team.
The Lakers season started ominously with an opening night loss to Golden State, and was then marked by humiliating blown leads to bottom feeders like Oklahoma City, visible altercations on the bench between the stars, open frustration with Westbrook’s horrid shooting and turnover numbers, constant injuries to James and Davis, and the team clearly checking out on the head coach who had brought them a title just two years prior, Frank Vogel.
The Lakers were eliminated from contention for the Play-In tournament (not even the playoffs!) with two games left to go in the regular season, finishing 33-49, the worst output by a team featuring LeBron James since his rookie season with the Cleveland Cavaliers 19 years ago when he was one year out of high school. Despite the obvious concerns before the season, this comically dysfunctional Lakers squad has to go down as one of the worst disappointments in NBA history. It was a horror movie for Lakers fans, and a never ending source of entertainment for most other NBA fans. NBA intelligentsia and fans more than followed LeBron’s preseason request of “keeping that same energy.”
So where do the Lakers and LeBron go from here? Despite the one title they won in 2020, they have missed the playoffs entirely in two of the four seasons since LeBron’s much hailed arrival in LA. Next season isn’t looking much brighter. James will turn 38 halfway through last season, and although he is still incredible at his best, he’s shown signs of slowing down over recent years, and is no longer the injury proof Iron Man he was for much of his career, as he has missed significant time in three of the past four seasons. Davis is injury prone as always, and is often accused of being soft by much of the NBA media, both for his constantly being in and out of the lineup and his seeming lack of an alpha mentality. Westbrook is such a negative asset that LA should do everything in their power to trade him in the last year of his contract, but who will take him? He’s owed $50 million next season, isn’t getting any younger, and isn’t getting any better. The Lakers also don’t have many enticing assets to attach to the Westbrook contract in order to bait a team into a trade, since all of their young assets were traded away to acquire Davis three years ago and Westbrook last year. Their only first round picks for the rest of this decade are in 2027 and 2029.
This debacle of a season has helped lay bare what many of the more tuned in NBA insiders, fans and media members have more or less known for the last decade, something that was largely covered up by LeBron’s arrival and their 2020 title in the NBA Bubble in Orlando: The Lakers are a rudderless mess, one of the most poorly run franchises in the entire NBA. Theoretically, they should have every advantage possible over other franchises. They are the league’s most storied franchise of all time, it’s most popular franchise, and they play in a huge media market with great weather year round in one of the league’s best arenas. Yet they’ve only made the playoffs twice in the past nine years. Prior to James’ arrival, the team bent itself over backwards to appease an aging and washed up Kobe Bryant in the last years of his career, dished out massive, unearned contracts to mediocre players such as Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov, and were a constant laughingstock of the league. What lured James to don the purple and gold was more the mystique of the franchise and the convenience of relocating his growing media empire from Cleveland to Los Angeles, nothing the Lakers did. The trade to acquire Davis was successful, but was more organized by LeBron and Davis’s mutual agency, Klutch Sports, than the Lakers themselves. All of their moves around the edges since they won their 2020 title have been comically bad, from swapping out all of their most effective role players for LeBron’s old timer friends like Carmelo Anthony, to letting fan favorite and defensive ace Alex Caruso walk, and culminating with the disastrous Westbrook trade.
To put the Lakers’ situation in poker terms, they’re pot-committed for the foreseeable future with a hand that is most likely drawing dead. So, as LeBron asked us to do nearly a year ago, we’ll be keeping that same energy about this comically dysfunctional circus of an NBA team for a long time.
