Are the Lakers finally worth watching?

Wrote about the Lakers, who are starting anew after Kobe Bryant’s retirement. An excerpt:

Even before last season’s circus sideshow of a Kobe Bryant Retirement Tour got underway, the Lakers were playing the most unwatchable brand of bad basketball in the league. It wasn’t just that the Lakers were bad under Byron Scott, who was hired as head coach in 2014 (and make no mistake, they were bad: they set a franchise record for most losses in a season during Scott’s first year as coach and then promptly broke it the following year). It was the way in which they were bad.

It’s not fun to watch a team that simply can’t stop the opposition and doesn’t really stand a chance of scoring, either. That was the 2014–2016 Lakers. They finished 23rd in offensive efficiency and 29th in defensive efficiency during the 2014–15 season, per NBA.com, and then promptly got worse on both sides of the ball in 2015–16, finishing 29th and 30th, respectively. They were 26th and 29th in fast-break points allowed, and 27th and 29th in opponents’ points in the paint. They rarely forced turnovers (24th and 28th in opponents’ turnover percentage) and offered next to no resistance at the basket (26th and 30th in opponents’ restricted area field goal percentage). When your games are literally just layup lines for the other team, it’s impossible to enjoy watching them.

Matters are made even worse when your coach glues exciting, young players like D’Angelo Russell and Larry Nance Jr. to the bench in order to find more minutes for Lou Williams (who is fine and all but not helping the Lakers do anything) and Roy Hibbert (whose last good season was Season 5 of Parks & Recreation). If you’re going to be bad, at least give the fans something to get excited about. And maybe find a way to not openly feud with the future of your franchise (Russell) in the media.

Read the full story at VICE Sports.