The End Always Looks Bad On LeBron Teams
Wikimedia Commons: Staff Sgt. Sheila deVera
The 2010 Cavaliers were full of guys-it-would’ve-been-cool-to-have-six-years-ago like Ben Wallace, Zyndrunas Illgauskas, Antawn Jamison, and Shaq. They went out with a whimper and a racist Dan Gilbert letter when LeBron took his talents to South Beach. The 2014 Miami Heat were so old, injured, and tired that the San Antonio Spurs 104-87 Game 5 Finals victory wasn’t even as close as the 17-point blowout final score would suggest. Not even the Heat drafting LeBron’s favorite player could keep him around. The Cleveland Cavaliers are just now starting to look decent after LeBron’s 2018 departure, and even that turnaround is surprising. Getting an Old LeBron and In-His-Prime Anthony Davis was supposed to set the Lakers up for both present and future. Well, present is goddamn terrible (2020 championship aside) and future looks in doubt. The Lakers should have known they needed to treat this situation deftly. They’ve instead elected to say “we’re the Lakers, it’ll work out.”
It hasn’t really worked out yet. That’s a weird thing to say about a team that won a championship, but missing the playoffs twice when you have LeBron James is a disaster. The Lakers seem so convinced by their own Lakerness that things’ll be fine. Kobe Bryant’s final 60-point game, affable retirement personality and tragic premature passing has seemed to make everyone forget that the Lakers were trash at the end of Kobe’s career and basically lucked into LeBron. LeBron’s storybook ending was with Cleveland, where he’s from. The latter tour in LA is an unprecedented third act for his long career. The Lakers are making it look like Pelè generously introducing the USA to soccer by playing on the New York Cosmos, not a coronating run of title contention. AND they’ve got nothing to build on for the future potentional Anthony Davis Era.
The front office seems infatuated with cap space to go after free agents in 2023, which is odd, because they won’t have enough money to chase a max star. Filling out your roster with fringe guys and veterans chasing rings hurts continuity in intangible ways that the sheer talent of LeBron and AD can’t cover. The Lakers already mortgaged their future to chase titles with LeBron, and time is running out. So why not pursue whatever trade you can get when “LeBron + AD = title” is still a thing? Moves like not extending Alex Caruso make the Lakers look cheap, and people are openly wondering if the Buss family should sell. Adam McKay’s hilarious Winning Time certainly made it seem like the Buss family fortune is more house of cards than they’d probably like to be perceived. Everyone at the Crypto Dot Com Arena would benefit from a deep playoff run this season. But much like Crypto ever being a thing, that deep playoff run looks like little more than delusional hope.