For the last five seasons, the Los Angeles Lakers have had arguably the best and most talented superstar duo in the NBA in LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Yet during that time, the results have been somewhat disappointing.
While they won a world championship in 2020, they have also missed the playoffs once and had to go through the play-in tournament in each of the other three seasons they have had the two future Hall of Famers.
For a franchise that consistently contended with other Hall of Fame duos such as Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol, it seems rather weak.
NBA reporter Tim Bontemps, upon seeing how well James and Davis played in helping Team USA win an Olympic gold medal, said the Lakers have done a very poor job in maximizing the two. He made his comments while on “Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective” recently (h/t Sports Illustrated).
“Maybe the single biggest takeaway for me from this whole tournament is that it showed to me how terribly the Lakers have been run for most of the past several years…The fact that the team has been built so poorly around him and Anthony Davis that they have been an afterthought the vast majority of the run and especially the past few years… With him and AD it remains unfathomable that this team is irrelevant and that’s what they are. Is irrelevant.”
James averaged 25.7 points, 8.3 assists and 7.3 rebounds a game while Davis put up 24.7 points, 12.6 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 2.3 blocked shots a game this past season. Yet the Lakers won a modest 47 games, giving them the eighth-best record in the Western Conference.
This offseason, they hired James’ good friend and podcast co-host JJ Redick to be their head coach while drafting James’ son Bronny with the No. 55 pick. While some feel the moves could pay off, others feel the moves are a sign that it is amateur hour in the team’s front office and that it has bent over to all of the elder James’ whims.
It remains to be seen if L.A. will make one final push to win it all again in James’ remaining time with the team.
