TEAM DREAMS: The Lakers are Beyond Good and Bad
“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
Friedrich Nietzsche died shortly after the invention of basketball, long before the NBA, much less the Los Angeles Lakers, had a chance to exist and impose their will on the universe. Nonetheless, he gave us a perfect description for this incarnation of the Lakers, a bizarre shadow of their former glory. All we need to do is translate “evil” into “bad,” and you know everything you need to know about the 2017–2018 Lakers, and the otherworldly dreamscape in which they reside.
“What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and bad.”
It has been years since Kobe Bryant, the Lakers’ patron revenant and spiritual locus, asserted his will to make the Lakers back-to-back NBA champions, which isn’t even to speak of the three-year title run starting in 2000. The Lakers have been drowned by the finery and jewels they refused to cast off. Kobe, the Lakers, and their fans stared into the abyss with Dwight Howard alongside them, and the abyss stared back. The conceit that the Lakers are a top-tier team was killed, at last, by the worst season in Lakers history.
But as Kobe Bryant left the court for the last time, a transformation had begun. In letting go of the need to dominate, last season was a prologue for a new tome of their history, and this one will be the strangest one yet. The illusion of quality may have fallen like scales from the eyes of Lakers fans around the world, but the history of the team remains. It lives in the Staples Center, a welcomed specter that can only be removed by the current residents. This specter is named Love, or maybe Codependency, or perhaps Defeat.
With this ghost in tow, everything the Lakers do takes on a forum blue and gold hue. The losses piled up last season, but none of that mattered because the future was so bright, the shade whispers. It may be right. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter if it’s right. If this year is not the year, the next year will be. Now that we have disposed with the idea that the Lakers are great, we can center the idea that they could be great. This is the new dancing star, born from chaos, the beacon the Lakers’ sextants home in on. This is Love.
The Lakers feature the world’s most enticing question mark in Lonzo Ball, a player who has yet to play an official NBA minute but yet who is already being prepared for his Hall of Fame induction speech. Brandon Ingram might be anything, so why not let him be a future star for now, and not the passable rotation player he will likely settle into. Jordan Clarkson has been on the cusp of something for two years now, and the cusp will back up with him should he fall short. Kyle Kuzma is a new, precious creature: that nascent talent whom pundits can pretend to be high on to cover up the fact that they really, truly want and hope for him to be special. This is less a team and more a collection of beloved sons who just need the right break, you’ll see.
None of this is to claim that they can’t become good, or even great. This is a talented group of players with a talented young head coach in Luke Walton and within a few years this team may be in the Western Conference playoff mix just on the backs of the players currently on the roster. It is, however, to claim that whether they actually manage it is completely beside the point for the Lakers. The Lakers and more critically, their fans, have achieved a sort of spiritual bliss in which the past and future shine so brightly that the stains and drudgery of the present are washed out and invisible. The eternal knowledge that next year, certainly, a top-ten player in the league will sign up to play alongside Lonzo et. al. is another arm of this internal feedback loop. Even if the current roster flops and busts, LeBron or Paul George, or both, or neither, or something better than that all await in that purple doorway, silhouetted and unidentifiable in the golden light of The Next Championship, The Next Kobe, The Next Magic.
The Lakers and their fans are the purest of all of us in a certain sense. Reality has been accepted, negotiated with and set aside, like the first time you realize you don’t have to drink the entire beer just because you started drinking it. There is much to love in this team, and the fact that they will be erroneously held up as a potential playoff team is not a weakness but a strength. The Lakers have killed their God, the need for a Larry O’Brien trophy to arrive right now, and have transcended the petty fight for supremacy. However dysfunctional the nature of it may be, this team is buoyed upon a cushion of love and joy from within and without. The Lakers and their fans are not beholden to anything as prosaic as “wins” and “losses.” They simply exist to be loved, as they deserve, beyond good and bad.
