1. Injuries and Discontinuity
Injuries are unavoidable and are part of every sport. Key players on many if not most other NBA teams were forced to miss games this season. Yet no team was impacted quite as adversely as the Lakers.
Here’s the proof. The four best and most important players on the team this year were LeBron James, Kyle Kuzma, Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball. Out of the Lakers 67 games so far this season, injuries (or for a few games, a suspension) limited the quartet to only 23 games together on the court.
Further proof: it may surprise you to learn that the Lakers record in those 23 games was a sterling 15-8, a winning percentage of 65.2%. Over a full 82-game season, that same percentage would have produced 53 wins.
On the one hand, those 23 games included the first two games of the season, when the players were just getting to know each other and the Lakers lost to Houston and Portland, two of the Western Conference’s strongest teams.
But they also included the team’s best stretch of the season, an 18-game portion, mostly in November, when the Lakers went 13-5 and climbed to 4th place in the West.
It is equally telling that in the 44 games when at least one of the Big 4 was out that the team won just 16 other games while losing 28, a .363 winning percentage. That seems to provide a further indictment of the remainder of the roster assembled by Magic/Rob.
The rest of the NBA won’t shed any tears for the Lakers. Several key Houston players, including Chris Paul and Chris Capela, missed significant time. But James Harden assumed control of the Rockets, performing at a historic level during their absence. He almost single-handedly kept the team afloat, for which he may earn league MVP honors.
It may not be a fair comparison, but LeBron James did not take the reins of the Lakers in a similar manner. Of course, he did miss 18 games due to injury.
When the young Lakers players were actually able to play alongside LeBron, the team had begun to gel and provided a glimpse of how good it might become. Unfortunately, that experience was severely limited to just 23 games this season.