LeBron has no one to blame but himself
The regular season of the NBA comes to an end and the LeBron James-led Los Angeles Lakers have once again missed the playoffs. Making this 2 of 4 times since James has been on the Lakers that they’ve missed the playoffs.
A lot of fans (outside of LA) believed this could be the outcome of this season once the Lakers traded for Russell Westbrook and made free-agent signings like Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard. But LeBron never believed so. He thought that he and Anthony Davis could carry the team to the playoffs, and after that, anything is up for grabs.
But that didn’t happen. The Lakers finished 33–49 and missed the new Play-In Tournament where the 9th and 10th seeded team has a chance to get into the playoffs. Where did it all go wrong? That blame lies to LeBron James and some to the Lakers front office.
LeBron James has been running the teams he’s been on for years. He constantly is trading away young players for a veteran players because he doesn’t have the patience for the young player to develop. Sometimes it’s worked. Sometimes it hasn’t.
This time it hasn’t. The Lakers gave up a bunch of promising young players to the Pelicans for Anthony Davis. Sure, they won in the 2020 Disney World bubble — but to a lot of people, that didn’t seem legit.
Since then, Anthony Davis has come to the team out of shape and gets injured regularly, despite being 29 years old. That’s been his MO his entire career. LeBron didn’t care, he wanted this guy on his team and now he’s paying the consequences.
Then this past offseason, everyone knew that Russell Westbrook was a ball-dominant player that couldn’t shoot and couldn’t get it done in the big moments. But LeBron has the Lakers front office trade for him anyway. And wouldn’t you know it, Russ was even worse than advertised. Now they will be stuck with him next year unless they can convince a team to take him.
The only time the Lakers seemed to go against LeBron’s orders/wishes was when they hired Frank Vogel as a coach. LeBron was making it known that he wanted Tyronn Lue as their coach. Perhaps the Lakers didn’t want LeBron having all the power, so they hired their guy.
Well, the team follows their leader, which is LeBron James. He clearly didn’t want to play for Vogel, especially this year. When a team gives up on its coach, it’s usually the sign of the end.
Was Vogel a bad coach? Who’s to say. I’m sure there are always things he wished he did, or lineup changes he should’ve put together. But at the end of the day, this team wasn’t winning with a prime Phil Jackson. And Vogel was the scapegoat.
Regardless, this is par for the course for LeBron James. Deplete the roster, spend a ton of money, and get a coach fired. If he wasn’t such a tremendous player, that would be his legacy.
LeBron’s only chance at another championship is to go and join a ready-made team. There’s just no path for the Lakers unless there’s a team dumb enough to trade for a fragile Anthony Davis, and a streaky, aging player such as Russell Westbrook. Not only that, they’d have to give the Lakers a solid return, which I don’t see happening.
The Lakers aren’t blameless in this, either. Even before LeBron came to town, their front office wasn’t making amazing signings. For instance, they are officially done paying Luol Deng’s contract today. He was signed in 2016 and only played 57 games with the Lakers. They stretched it out so they didn’t have to eat the money all at once.
Timofey Mozgov was another terrible signing by the Lakers.
That being said, a proud organization such as the Lakers with the richest history in basketball shouldn’t be bowing down to one player and letting him make the majority of decisions for this franchise. They should’ve put good basketball people in the front office and let them do their job.
So was it all worth it for LeBron and the Lakers? Sadly, yes. They technically got a ring out of it. Regardless of your opinion of the matter, when you look at the record books, it will show the 2020 Los Angeles Lakers and NBA Champions. And that is almost always worth the fallout of what comes after.
