[OFFICIAL] Russell Westbrook as a Los Angeles Laker thread

I despise the play in, it only serves to give mediocrities like the Lakers an undeserved shot at the already bloated playoffs.


And even that won't save them.

 

so you approve of tanking but disapprove of playin?
makes sense

 

the play in, especially in the wcf are essentially rewarding losers. Teams are 10+ games under .500. These are not playoff teams. they need to stop with this letting loser teams get a shot in the playoffs. it's a gimmick

 

It's very frustrating seeing the play in bullshit play out this year in WCF. Absolute garbage that one of those 9/10 seeded teams have a chance to get into the playoffs. There should be some sort of criteria of what could constitute a play in, such as teams are within 1 game of each other, or are tied, or something.

 

good idea. they should also add that to even qualify for a play in game your team has to have a winning record. if not they should leave the standings as is prior to the play in

 

Having a winning record should automatically qualify you unless the other teams also have winning records. That should be the rule at a minimum.

 

so you approve tanking but not approve the play-in?
you approve teams that lose games on purpose, dont even compete and lose but wouldn't give a second chance to teams that competed but came short?

 

who said I approve of tanking?You lose bc you suck and your team actually sucks. they go hand in hand. Calling it tanking is something folks want to use so they dont want to admit a team sucks

The play in makes no sense in situations like what the western conference current state is. getting teams as much as 15 games below .500 is an absolute joke.

 

Blessing in the sky and disguise that DeRozan didn't go there. More money, surpassed his potential as a player, shut a lot of people up, and he didn't have to deal with the toxicity/media attention of the Lakers.

 

Magic is right. Lakers with DeRozan and not losing their better secondary guys in the Westbrook trade, the Lakers would be contending.
Lakers suck

 

https://theathletic.com/3227942/202...dukes-mark-williams-hollingers-week-that-was/


The Lakers’ season is over. Now what?

It’s been obvious for some time to all the passengers onboard that the train is headed this way, but Sunday’s results seemed to remove any lingering doubt about the final destination of the Lakers’ woebegone season. With LeBron James sitting out while nursing a sprained ankle and a one-legged Anthony Davis trying and failing to counteract the league’s reigning MVP, the Lakers were outmatched against the Denver Nuggets. They didn’t play notably badly; in fact, Russell Westbrook might have had his best game of the season. They just weren’t good enough.

The loss, combined with San Antonio’s win later that night over the Portland Tankers, dropped the Lakers two games behind the Spurs in the standings for the final Play-In spot with four contests to play. The Lakers also lose the tiebreaker to San Antonio and thus must make up three games on San Antonio in the next week. The Spurs’ magic number is two; the Lakers could be eliminated as early as Tuesday.

It’s not technically over, then, but … it’s over.

As if to underline how far they’ve fallen, the Lakers were outclassed by the same Denver team that they easily beat in the conference finals two years ago … even though the Nuggets have two max contract players who are out for the season.

Put simply, the 2021-22 Lakers were a paper tiger, a hollowed-out facsimile of the team that dominated the 2020 Bubble. I think it’s easy for people to look at the bold-type names and blame the injuries and the Westbrook trade. LeBron has missed 22 games and Davis has missed 39, and certainly, that hasn’t helped, but the Lakers were not the only team to have an injury this year. (I mean, look at Denver.) The problems went much, much deeper.

The knee-jerk “blame the injuries” analysis glosses over how fraudulent the Lakers’ full-strength roster was as any kind of contender to do anything of consequence. Yes, James and Davis only played 22 games together … but the Lakers went 11-11 in those games and were outscored this year with the two on the court together. In their biggest game of the season, with everyone playing, they lost at home to the 34-43 New Orleans Pelicans.

Wait, it gets better. The Lakers have been outscored this year with James on the court … and with Davis on the court … and with Russell Westbrook on the court. They have been outscored with James and Davis playing together, and when James plays without Davis, and when Davis plays without James. They’ve been outscored with James and Davis playing with Westbrook, and with James and Davis playing without Westbrook. Tell me the scenario, and the Lakers were beaten in it.

I bring all this up because the solutions are not simple for the Lakers’ current malaise, and it’s not nearly as easy as “run it back and hope LeBron and Davis are healthy.” James showed once again that he is a superhuman freak, putting together an All-NBA caliber season at the age of 37, but even he has his limits; he’s played 45 and 56 games the past two seasons. Given the mounting toll of over 63,000 NBA minutes (including playoffs) on his lower extremities, it doesn’t seem realistic in any season going forward to expect more than 65 games from him, especially if said season includes any kind of aspirations of postseason success.

Davis, meanwhile, is a more vexing case. At 29 he should theoretically be in his prime, but he’s played only 73 games over the past two seasons. OK, that’s bad enough, but the side issue that doesn’t get enough conversation is that his level of play has also dropped. Davis posted a PER of 27.4 in 2019-20, one that shot to 29.6 in his dominant playoff run. The past two seasons he’s been at 22.1 and 24.1, respectively – still really good, but not the MVP-candidate level of that season or his final one in New Orleans (30.3).

Of particular note is what’s happened to his shot. Davis was a good enough shooter as a Pelican, and in his first Laker season, to be a plausible stretch 4 and a pick-and-pop threat as a 5. In 2019-20 he shot 33.0 percent from 3 and 84.6 percent from the line.

This year he’s at 19.1 percent from 3 and 70.6 percent from the line. His midrange percentages have theoretically held up, but only because he’s replaced a lot of pick-and-pop 3-point attempts with pick-and-pop 2s because his 3s have become so unreliable; he’s taking half as many 3s as two years ago. In other words, he’s padding his midrange stats with relatively low-hanging fruit at a cost of the shot that actually made him a threat.

And some of the misses … I mean, it’s a little unfair of me to pull a clip from a game where he probably shouldn’t have been playing, but this kind of thing isn’t exactly a rare sight this year:

Vid

 

Of course, we haven’t even discussed the elephant in the room. Even if James and Davis magically revert to their 2019-20 selves, the Lakers are facing a pretty daunting 1-2 dilemma heading into next season:

1. The roster at spots 3 through 15 is the worst in the league
2. They have few mechanisms available to improve it

Let’s linger on point No. 1 for a minute. L.A.’s spin through free agency in 2021 yielded a bounty that included Kendrick Nunn, Trevor Ariza, Kent Bazemore, Dwight Howard, Carmelo Anthony, Wayne Ellington, DeAndre Jordan and Rajon Rondo. Only Anthony and Monk paid off to any extent, and even then it was more “relative to the other options here” than some kind of rousing success.

Amazingly, every single Laker not named James or Davis had a negative BPM this past season. The Lakers gave over 3,500 minutes to players with single-digit PERs, including 1,388 to Avery Bradley (7.9); throughout the second half of the season leaned heavily on other teams’ discards (Stanley Johnson, D.J. Augustin, Wenyen Gabriel, Bradley) because their own offseason went so badly. Undrafted Austin Reaves felt like a revelation by comparison, but he finished with a 10.4 PER, -2.6 BPM and a 30.7 percent mark from 3.

As a result, the Lakers enter the offseason with two All-Stars … and no other starting-caliber players. Westbrook is the only other player who would crack the top eight on a good team.

So if that’s the case … how do they get better? Pull up some pictures of puppies in your other browser tab, because this is where things get depressing.

Free agency? Ha. The Lakers already are way over the cap, and stand at next year’s projected luxury tax line even with just seven players under contract. They will have the taxpayer midlevel exception available, and minimum exceptions after that.

Realistically, the Lakers can get a halfway decent third guard who falls through the free agency cracks with their taxpayer MLE, much like they did a year ago with Nunn. And then they’re taking fliers on minimum contract guys, hopefully, this time with an average age below 90. Overall, free agency will be a roster Band-Aid at best.

The draft? Ha. Bartered those picks years ago to get Davis. The Lakers’ first-round pick is likely headed to the Pelicans, after Memphis acquired the pick last June with top-10 protection because it seemed unfathomable that the Lakers could finish with one of the league’s 10 worst records. Over the last few weeks, that latter detail became more interesting than the Lakers’ actual basketball team. (L.A’s record is the eighth-worst right now; Memphis will be praying for three teams to hurl the Lakers at the lottery). Oh, their second-round pick is gone, too, although L.A. could buy its way into a pick in the 40s. The Lakers will have a first-round pick in 2023 but can’t trade it; the first one they can put in a deal is not until 2027. Speaking of which …

Trades? Ha. With what? How do you do a trade if you have nobody under contract, no cap space and no draft picks? The only trade “assets” in the Lakers’ quiver are Talen Horton-Tucker, signed to a bloated $10 million-a-year deal with a 2023 player option (in a related story, he is a Klutch client), and the non-guaranteed minimum deal of Reaves.

Sign-and-trades? Ha. Not gonna happen. With the Lakers being at the tax line already, a sign-and-trade for another player will be virtually impossible since it would take the Lakers over the apron.

So how do they get out of this jam?

The prime issue, of course, is Westbrook and his radioactive $47 million cap number for 2022-23, the decaying plutonium left over from a disastrous offseason trade that sent out Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Montrezl Harrell and their 2022 first-round pick. There is exactly one player in the entire NBA that Westbrook can be traded for, realistically, and that is John Wall. We’ve already seen this movie once, but I’m not sure how much a rerun will help change things for L.A. Wall makes an identical $47 million next year after taking a DNP-NotFeelingIt with the Rockets this season and presents many of the same fit issues on the court.

The Lakers do have some pathways to potentially improve the roster next year, but they all involve another churn on the asset treadmill by turning lightly protected future firsts in 2027 and 2029 into a third-best player. For instance, they could trade Horton-Tucker, Kendrick Nunn and at least one first to get enough matching salary to acquire, say, Jerami Grant, or any guard with an active pulse.

More provocatively, they could trade Westbrook if they could convince the Thunder to take him back. Obviously, Oklahoma City’s Sam Presti would only do this if doing so could get his mitts on unprotected Laker firsts in 2027 and 2029, but it’s an option.

Unusually, this trade would have to happen before July 1, since the Thunder’s $31 million in cap room will vanish once Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s max extension kicks in. A deal of Westbrook and the two firsts above for Derrick Favors, Ty Jerome and Kenrich Williams would give the Lakers enough wiggle room to use their full midlevel and biannual exceptions to rebuild the supporting cast, as well as potentially taking on more money in trades involving Nunn and Horton-Tucker. A massive $34 million trade exception from this deal would also be huge; the Lakers could take in some unwanted veteran salaries here to build out the back end of the rotation.

However, look at those draft picks again, and the fact Westbrook only has one year left on his deal. It’s a pretty massive future cost to allow some sunlight in for the 2022-23 season.

More realistic, perhaps, is using the stretch provision to cut Westbrook’s $47 million into bite-sized chunks of $15.7 million each of the next three years. That gets L.A. out of the tax, but cuts into a potential cap room bonanza in 2023. This is one of the few markets where max cap room speaks loudly, obviously, and one would question the long-term benefit of this move when the short-term gain is getting under the tax.

All of which takes us back to perhaps the best alternative of all, even if it’s the least palatable in the short term: Do they need to take their medicine? Try to do better on minimum contracts and cap exceptions, run it back next year, and position themselves for the 2023 free-agent market? It’s depressing to think a team with James and Davis has to go into “keep our powder dry” mode and punt on high aspirations for next season, but that’s the corner into which the Lakers have painted themselves.

There’s also the idea that something better may lie around the corner if the Lakers can exhibit some patience. Westbrook’s expiring deal, for instance, could pair with those two future firsts to bring in the next disgruntled superstar (coughLillardcough) at the 2023 trade deadline; that’s one of the few imaginable scenarios where next season’s team ends up legitimately threatening.

Regardless of which option the Lakers choose, it’s going to be a massive challenge for their beleaguered front office to cobble together even a halfway decent supporting cast around their two tentpole stars. They failed miserably in that challenge in the summer of 2021, and don’t appear positioned to fare much better this time around. Thus, the worst part of the Lakers’ 2021-22 season is not the current misery, it’s the lack of any reason for optimism that 2022-23 will be much different.

 

1. They have to trade AD. Assuming Buss and Pelinka have attached their proverbial wagon to LeBron's star (even if it's just for next season), they need to use AD to restock their roster. John Collins/Bogdanovic/picks, Vucevic/White/Dosunmu/picks, Hayward/Washington/Jones/picks, etc...whatever can net them talent and volume back for Davis. Even at age 39 LeBron can still drag an average team into the playoffs; what he can no longer do is drag an ass team. Give Lebron on more shot next season and then part ways after that. You should have at least one good young player from the AD trade to potentially build around for the future.

2. Buy out Westbrook. Trading for John Wall by attaching a 1st to Russ is nice for us but it does nothing for "the now" for LA. Remove Russ from the equation so no one on that team has to worry about putting him back into the equation.

3. Let LeBron dictate his next move. That sounds stupid given the fact that he's had the organization by the balls since he got there but let him decide what he wants to do--does he want to just ride out his contract with whatever team LA surrounds him with after trading AD...or does he want out? If it's the latter then you can recoup some decent assets for LeBron, which would be better than nothing if he bolts via free agency. If he does, in fact, ride it out for next season at least you'll still be an attraction. If he leaves then that frees up more capspace for summer of 2023.

Of course I expect LAbron to do the complete opposite of 1-3 and ride it out with AD, trade Westbrook by mortgaging its future, and finish somewhere in the 7-10th seed range but with AD's huge contract and no future draft picks to speak of.

 

Doc Rivers. That dude been catfishing people since his one championship. I say go for it, would be high level entertainment to get Doc on the Lakers.

 

People forget but Doc’s best coaching job relative to talent was actually the 1999-2000 Orlando Magic season. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999–2000_Orlando_Magic_season

He managed a 41-41 record with a roster filled with role players and nobodies. Their best player was Darrell Armstrong.

They had such a crap roster because the Magic was planning to form a Big 3 the next season by signing Tim Duncan, T Mac, and Grant Hill in free agency.