thelesterlee
The Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Title 18 months ago. They are now struggling to make the 10th seed and it is now being reported the team will be firing head coach, Frank Vogel, when this terrible season finally ends.
The Lakers—a team with LeBron fucking James on the roster—is ranked 23rd in offensive rating. Everyone who goes to work for this organization deserves blame for what occurred this season but it appears as though only Frank Vogel will be punished.
So who is the most responsible for the Lakers sucking this year?
Let’s start with Vogel who did that thing that mediocre coaches do where they have set favorite players who will always get minutes despite not at all deserving them Avery Bradley averages about 1 solid on-ball defensive possession a game. Good for him. That is an incredibly low number of good defensive possessions for a player who is truly only out there for his defense. Yet, he still seems to always be on the court doing nothing offensively.
Injuries affect every time in the NBA we cannot rush to use that as an excuse for the Lakers playing like dogshit. The Clippers lost Kawhi for the entirety of the season and Paul George for half of it. They will be in the playoffs.
The Blazers shut down Damian Lillard and traded away CJ McCollum at the deadline. Portland has a better second-half record (11-26) than the Lakers (10-27). When a team underperforms this badly, you have to look at the head coach and his inability to motivate his players to compete at a high level consistently every night.
It’s easy to assign blame to Russell Westbrook who seemed to dedicate this season to the memes. No one has worked harder to supply the internet with jokes than Westbrook. He is truly the Mitch Hedberg of the NBA. Airball after airball after brick off the side of the backboard. Prolific levels of comedy. He’s this generation’s Rodney Dangerfield—along with sad rants about getting no respect and referencing his wife and kids over and over.
But we knew Frank Vogel was a high floor/low ceiling head coach and Russell Westbrook had a broken jumper. You cannot blame them for being exactly what they’ve always been.
Before I shit all over the person who for sure ruined the Lakers season, I want to quickly make it very clear that we can all stop talking about ‘what if’ the Lakers signed DeMar DeRozan or traded for Buddy Hield instead of Russell Westbrook because this is the most hindsight shit in the history of hindsight.
DeMar DeRozan deserves every MVP vote he’s about to get after what he’s done for the Chicago Bulls. He’s elevated himself to the mid-range gawd belonging in every ‘who has the best jumper’ barbershop convo across the country. (The answer is Kawhi Leonard, by the way).
But to pretend as if the entire NBA world didn’t look at him as the guy who shriveled and disappeared in the playoffs for the Toronto Raptors every season is disingenuous.
Real NBA nerds knew DeRozan’s playmaking skills leveled up when he was traded to San Antonio but do you think LeBron was aware of that? And do you think the people in the Lakers front office that were aware of DeRozan’s progression actually thought he was better than Russell Westbrook?
Same shit goes for Buddy Hield—a guy who fell out of the Sacramento Kings starting 5. I am not buying that Lakers fans would’ve been happy with a Buddy Hield/Malik Monk backcourt. In fact, that sounds like something the Sacramento Kings would do and even they didn’t even want that.
This is not an attempt to rid the Lakers front office of blame. This is the only team in the NBA that would seriously consider hiring a guy with zero experience solely off the strength of being Kobe Bryant’s former agent.
But the Cavs front office consistently struggled to make good decisions and LeBron still carried them to the Finals every season.
No this year’s failures fall at the very sensitive feet of one, Anthony Davis.
I’ve never enjoyed how freely people mock Davis for his inability to stay healthy. The TNT crew laughs way too hard at the sight of him sitting inactive in street clothes on the bench. Not sure why people find so much pleasure in Davis’s literal pain.
But I can’t help but think AD should be more. In an era where the best 3 players in the NBA, year after year, are Giannis, Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic, it’s insane how much of an afterthought Davis has become in the best big man conversation.
The guy was voted to the NBA 75 team and we may never see him play better than Karl-Anthony Towns is right now. The Lakers thought AD was going to join the list of historic centers but he’s just Andrew Bynum with an ironic razor sponsorship.
LeBron did not sign up to play with Dwight Howard and Wayne Ellington. He and Anthony Davis were supposed to form a dynasty and now Davis is in danger of becoming one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ in NBA history.
