Could the Los Angeles Lakers regret the max contract they handed to LeBron James by the time it comes to an end after three more seasons?
LeBron James is currently playing out the first season of the 4-year max contract he signed this past summer. Things haven’t exactly gone the way everyone in LA had hoped for.
Let’s examine “King James” stats for the season and some gloomy facts about LeBron to see if he will live up to the max money he’s going to make over the next three years.
LeBron’s stats for the 2018-2019 season (courtesy of www.basketball-refrence.com):
- Value Over Replacement Player: 3.3, the second worst of his career slightly behind his rookie year
- Box Plus/Minus: 7.7, the 3rd worst of his career
- Win Shares: 5.4, the 2nd worst of his career slightly behind his rookie year
- Defensive Win Shares: 1.9, the worst of his career
- Defensive Rating: 107, the 3rd worst of his career, slightly ahead of his last two seasons with the defensively challenged Cavaliers
- Offensive Rating: 115, the 5th worst of his career
It’s clear that this is one of LeBron’s worst seasons of his career. The other Lakers can’t be blamed for LeBron’s problems either because James’ stats from last year when he played on the Cavaliers are MUCH better than this season. You don’t hear a single person say his supporting cast last year is better than this season.
Take a look at his 2017-2018 stats:
- VORP: 8.9, almost three times higher than this year
- BPM: 9.6, the 6th highest of his career
- WS: 14, almost three times higher than this year
- DWS: 3.0, not great, but still much higher than this year
- DEFRTG: 109, the worst of his career, but he was obviously saving all of his energy for his 8th run to the finals in a row. Can anybody say he’s doing the same this year when the Lakers only have a 5.8% chance of making the playoffs?
- OFFRTG: 118, one of the highest of his career
Just looking at the huge drop-off in LeBron’s statistics from last year to this season is making my heart beat faster and my spine tingle. As a Lakers fan, I’ve had these same feelings before: in fact, twice over the last few seasons.
During the summer of 2012, the Lakers signed a 38-year old former MVP named Steve Nash to a 3-year, $30 million contract.
He was very similar to LeBron because he was renowned around the NBA for his diet and his conditioning. The dude took care of his body better than 99% of the other players in the league. He played eight seasons with the Phoenix Suns and he never suffered a major injury during that entire span.
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Of course, right after the Lakers signed Nash to his three-year contract, he suffered an obscure injury and he ended up missing 32 games during his first season with the Lakers. Then, as every Lakers fan already knows, he went on to play a sad 15 games over the last two years of his contract, which really hurt the Lakers long-term.
During the summer of 2013, the Lakers signed another former MVP who is also my favorite player of all time, Kobe Bryant. Kobe inked a 3-year, $90 million contract and ended up playing 107 total games over his last three years.
I love Kobe, but if Nash’s 3-year contract “hurt the Lakers long-term,” then the “Black Mamba’s” deal destroyed the Purple and Gold, and LA has just finished feeling the reverberations of Kobe’s amazingly bad 3-year agreement with the Lakers.
Is history repeating itself? Did the Lakers just sign another aging former MVP, just to see his body break down and his contract devastate the future of the Purple and Gold for the 3rd time this decade?
Looking at LeBron’s stats and the way he’s looked since returning from the longest injury of his career, my ‘Spidey Sense’ is starting to tell me that the Lakers might be in trouble.
To make matters worse, LeBron’s and the Lakers problems go deeper than just his poor stats (for LeBron) for the season. The entire world knows that LeBron wanted Magic and Pelinka to trade the young core for Anthony Davis, which has fractured the Lakers locker room.
Since LeBron’s come back from his injury the Lakers are 3-4 and there have been a few games (Indiana and Atlanta) where nobody on the Purple and Gold seemed to care about winning. Basketball is a team sport and no matter how much other people in the media want to try to convince basketball fans that one superstar’s gravity can win games by itself, it’s not true.
The players on a basketball squad have to like each other and support one another. They must be willing to sacrifice for each other, for the good of the team.
Magic can meet with the players all he wants and tell them not to feel sad that LeBron and the front office didn’t want them on the team, and that it’s a business, and that they need to pick their heads up, so on and so forth. Judging by the way the Lakers played after Magic met with the team in Philadelphia, his pep talk didn’t work. In fact, it might have made things worse.
The Lakers have 24 games left this season and perhaps they will end up turning things around and making the postseason. LeBron’s teams always seem to make the playoffs and do well once they reach the postseason.
But, if LA never gels and misses the postseason for the 6th year in a row, which many smart people in Las Vegas and around the league believe will be the case, then Magic and Pelinka are going to have to make some very difficult decisions over the summer.
In fact, the Lakers front office might be forced to trade the young core after the season is finished. If “Maginka” find that most of the players on the Lakers have lost their trust in LeBron and do not want to play with him anymore, then they’ll have to make one or two trades just to fix the chemistry issues on the team.
If the Lakers:
- Deal Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, and Kyle Kuzma this summer, for a good, but not great player, because of the way “King James” treated them, thus mortgaging the future of the team.
- Must suffer through another aging superstar’s downward descent into an average player, who’s out large stretches of the season due to injury and who is also making max-contract money.
I’d be willing to say: LeBron James has one of the worst contracts in the NBA.