Los Angeles Lakers: 5 most important questions facing team
By Ed Schrenzel
A tangible sense of excitement and hope has taken hold of Los Angeles Lakers fans as training camp opens in a few weeks and their first exhibition game is September 30th.
The Los Angeles Lakers are trying to move forward from the worst four-year stretch in the team’s celebrated history. They won their 16th NBA title in 2010, and have since steadily sunk into never-experienced, hard-to-fathom depths.
That included the ill-fated trades for Dwight Howard and Steve Nash, the death of renowned owner Jerry Buss, and the injury-plagued decline and eventual retirement of star Kobe Bryant.
The upcoming season will, of course, be the first one with Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka at the helm of the team. They inherited a roster of mostly younger players, and then proceeded to make it even younger, as it is among the most youthful roster in the league.
The roster includes only three veterans aged 29 or older. Four of the five prospective starters are under 25 and have no more than four years of NBA experience.
The task for Johnson and Pelinka sounds simple enough; return the Lakers to championship contention. Accomplishing that, of course, is anything but simple. This season can largely be viewed as the initial phase of their long-term strategy to return the team to winning ways.
The future tactics that the new management uses to attain that goal will be largely impacted by the answers learned this season to the five biggest questions facing the team entering training camp and the 2017-18 season.