Los Angeles Lakers: How times have changed in recent years

The possibility of the Los Angeles Lakers drafting another point guard in the upcoming draft brings up a memory of times when interior players were the reason for LA’s success.

It seems a long time ago when the Los Angeles Lakers were being led by Kobe Bryant to a third straight NBA Finals, winning the second consecutive championship in an epic Game 7 against the Boston Celtics. In fact, a while has passed but the struggles of recent years make those times seem far more distant.

In those days the Lakers were cruising through the NBA, pairing 2008 MVP Kobe Bryant with a deadly rotation of three big men; All-Star Pau Gasol, the young and rising Andrew Bynum, and eventual Sixth Man of the Year Lamar Odom.

Every lineup which played major minutes in those years used a combination of two of the three big men (when Bynum was available). Most notably in 2010, the starters, featuring Gasol at the 4 and Bynum at the 5, were the most used lineup by a wide margin.

No other team in the NBA could boast such a thrilling duo of seven-footers able to share the ball the way they did. Especially thanks to Gasol, one of the best passing big men in the league. Besides being the second scoring option on the team and a double-double machine, averaged 3.5 assists per game finding illuminating passes from the low post.

Often labeled as ‘soft’ (yeah, ask Garnett about that dunk in game 2 of the 2008 NBA Finals), he was (and still is) an underrated defender. He has averaged 1.7 blocks per game in his career, with 4.2 defensive win shares during the championship years. Gasol also had a defensive box plus/minus of 3.0 in 2010, per Basketball-Reference.

Bynum was the glad recipient of many of those passes by Gasol, often connecting on the other side of alley-oops thrown from the high post. On the verge of becoming the last dominant center in the NBA (don’t even try to think about Howard!), his knee issues prevented him from reaching his full potential after his first and only All-Star year. He was probably not the most focused guy, as pointed out more than once by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and proved by off-court incidents, but his ceiling was really high and he was promising to become an unstoppable force in the NBA had he stayed healthy.

Anyway, in his early 20’s Bynum was a wonderful complement to Gasol, when able to play since his knees already bothered him. He played a full 82-game season only once in his whole career and his absence in the 2008 NBA playoffs was the main reason for the blowout loss to the Celtics.

To make up for Bynum’s absence there was sixth man Lamar Odom, the only player left from the Shaquille O’Neal trade. After some good seasons as a starter, he found his niche coming off the bench for a contending Lakers team. A versatile power forward with exceptional playmaking skills, he was often used as a ball handler to initiate the triangle offense by Phil Jackson, who favored having players bigger than a point guard to start the offensive play.