Let’s Overreact to Lakers Opening Night!
The NBA Season is finally here and the Lakers kicked their season off with a loss to Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors which can only mean one thing….it’s time to make giant, sweeping generalisations about my favourite team. After all, calm and sensible takes would be against the spirit of being a Laker fan. Here are five overreactions to Lakers opening night…
LeBron for MVP
We know that the MVP award is as much about narrative as it is stats or winning, so let’s go ahead and get this one started early: LeBron James looks good. Really good. As skeptical as I may have been about the talk of adding ‘lean muscle’ in the offseason, he does look noticeably more sleek and was getting up and down the court like a 36 year old gazelle. He led the Lakers with 34//11/5 including a very tidy 5–11 from 3PT land. The three point shot continues to be a surprising focus of his evolution as an ageing basketball player despite most always assuming he would end his career camped out in the low post. He took a career-high 6.3 attempts per game his last two seasons, with those 3PT attempts representing 34% of his total shot attempts last season — also a career-high. If LeBron can hover around the high 30’s in 3PT shooting percentage this season on that kind of volume it will go a long way to solving some of the Laker’s problems, the most glaring of which is out there wearing a number 0 jersey.
That Buddy Hield deal looks really good right now
Westbrook stunk. He’s a terrible fit and will continue to stink all season and cost the Lakers a shot at another championship. Don’t say I didn’t warn you — these are overreactions. At the time of the trade, the naysayers’ perspective was simple: adding a guard who can’t shoot, yet insists on shooting quite a lot anyway, is hugely problematic. Opening night poured gasoline all over that fire as Russ went 4–13 from the field, including 0–4 from 3Pt for a disastrous -23 in box plus minus. If you had buried the details of the Buddy Hield trade deep down in a hope to forget them after the Lakers jumped ship at the 1 Yard line, it was Hield for Kuzma and Harrell with a pick thrown in. The deal likely meant holding onto KCP as well as the opportunity to pay Alex Caruso to stay thanks to the extra cap room available without Russ on the books. Long story short, the Lakers could have had Hield, KCP and Caruso instead of Westbrook, Bazemore and Ellington to add to other signings like Monk and Nunn. After one game, Westbrook has a lot of work left to do before Laker Nation puts this behind them.
Can we just hurry up and waive DeAndre Jordan already?
Speaking of bad signings — I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more redundant body on a basketball court. Jordan has not been a relevant NBA player in 2 or 3 seasons, lacks any kind of athleticism to even play spot minutes at centre and has never been a skill-based big which can only mean one thing — his career is over. His redundancy is only exacerbated by Westbrook’s presence on the court, which takes the spacing issues from bad to worse. Remember, this is a point guard who left Houston no other option than to trade Clint Capella for 70 cents on the dollar because playing a non-shooting big next to him was impossible. Waive Jordan and go get a helpful piece on the buyout market. Simple.
One team’s trash is another team’s treasure
Avery Bradley wasn’t expected to play; he was only signed the day before tip-off after the Warriors waved him. But late in the game, with Bazemore in foul trouble and the Laker defense in a mess, Vogel threw him in. He defended well and knocked down a couple of open threes for an overall net positive in 8 minutes. Finding value on the NBA scrap heap is the name of the game for the LeBron-era Lakers and that won’t change in 2021/22. Come to think of it, ‘scrap heap’ is a terribly derogatory term for some of the greatest athlete’s on the planet and the five hundredish best basketball players in existence. Anyway…AB’s appearance told us two things: firstly, this roster isn’t finished and likely won’t be until after the buyout market. Secondly, this team will go as far as LeBron and AD take it and the front office is all-in on this top heavy approach. They didn’t just lead the team statistically on opening night, they bailed out broken possessions time and time again while all the new additions worked out some kinks.
Bazemore is an elite three & D wing
Again, in the spirit of overreacting, Bazemore was fantastic and will be the key piece for this team to go all the way. But seriously, let’s end on a high note. Despite posting only modest stats (8pts on 3–9 shooting and 2–8 from 3PT), he was every bit a reliable role player for 31 minutes and ended the night with a team high plus/minus of +10. What the box score doesn’t show is his high level defense, which was missing badly from a number of other rotations Vogel tried over the course of the night. Bazemore was the primary defensive option to guard Steph Curry and, in addition to keeping Steph to 5–21 shooting, visibly made life really difficult for him all night. He was great. He plays hard and within himself. I hope to see him continue to grow in his role alongside the stars.
