2. The Los Angeles Lakers failed to replenish the team
One of the challenges of winning multiple championships is finding a way of bringing in younger, serviceable players to replace older ones.
By 2002, the Lakers were starting to get long in the tooth. Fox, Horry and Shaw were now in their 30s and weren’t quite as productive as they were just a few short years ago. That put more and more on the shoulders of Bryant and O’Neal, and by the 2003 NBA Playoffs, the team as a whole looked like they were out of juice.
When you’re always over the salary cap like the Lakers were, you have two main tools to replenish your team: the draft and free agency.
Their draft record during those years was dismal. They selected Devean George with the 23rd pick of the 1999 draft, who had lots of athletic ability but an absolute lack of NBA-level basketball skills and instincts. Just one pick later, the Utah Jazz took Andrei Kirilenko, a 6-foot-9 forward who would average 12.4 points, 2.8 assists and 1.9 blocked shots a game in his first dozen seasons in the NBA.
The next year, the Lakers used the 29th overall pick on Mark Madsen, an unathletic, unskilled player who got by on hustle, effort and desire. With the 43rd pick, the Milwaukee Bucks took Michael Redd, who would average 19.0 points a game in his 11-season career and become one of the league’s better 3-point shooters.
The draft blunders would continue, as the Lakers would pass on Carlos Boozer in 2002 and Leandro Barbosa, Josh Howard, Mo Williams and Kyle Korver in 2003.
In the summer of 2002, when the supporting cast was showing real signs of decline, the Lakers had their biannual mid-level exception to use in free agency. Chauncey Billups was available that summer, and could’ve filled a couple of big voids on the team: the point guard position, as well as a third scorer.
Instead, Billups signed with the Detroit Pistons for their mid-level exception, and the Lakers used, or should I say wasted theirs on re-signing Devean George.