The Los Angeles Lakers are pretenders. Their top-heavy roster lacks offensive balance and defensive consistency, and their poor play against postseason-caliber teams is proof that they can't actually win a championship in 2025-26.
If you follow the Lakers even somewhat closely, you've heard all of that before. Unfortunately for its critics, Los Angeles has evolved beyond those premature narratives.
It's been said that the Lakers aren't true contenders because they're 12-18 against teams that are .500 or better. Sorry: Were 12-18. Now, they're 17-18 after recording five consecutive wins over teams that are on pace to make the playoffs.
Four of those victories were against top-six teams in the Western Conference: The Denver Nuggets, Houston Rockets (twice), and Minnesota Timberwolves.
Despite that surge, the elephant in the room is that the Lakers are dreadful on defense—except for the fact that they're No. 11 in the NBA in defensive rating since Feb. 1. That's a 22-game sample size that equates to more than a quarter of the regular season.
As for the top-heavy rotation with lackluster balance, LeBron James has accepted his status as the No. 3 option on offense and the Lakers have scored at least 120 points in five of their past seven games.
Another point of clarification: Los Angeles is 7-0 during that time, with five games played against playoff teams.
Lakers are answering every question that critics had for them
With the Lakers spending nearly two full months in peak form, it's time to drop the tired narratives and accept what this team has become. Head coach JJ Redick has been putting the pieces together over time, with hurdles that included starting the season without LeBron James and then all but immediately losing Austin Reaves to an injury of his own.
Crazy as it may be, the Lakers needed time to get their three stars healthy and on the court together before they could define an ideal hierarchy between them.
Despite those unenviable road blocks, the Lakers are one of just seven teams with at least 20 wins at home and on the road this season. The only other Western Conference teams to accomplish that feat are the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs.
Moreover, the Lakers have a 1.5-game lead as the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference and have defeated all three of the teams within 2.5 games of them over the past nine days.
With Luka Doncic on pace to win the scoring title, Reaves making the leap to borderline star status, and James acting as arguably the most talented No. 3 in the NBA, the Lakers have the top-end talent to defeat anyone. Their supporting cast, meanwhile, appears to be having an easier time figuring out how and where it fits now that a star-level hierarchy has been established.
Skeptics and critics will inevitably remain, and the Lakers certainly aren't a perfect team, but calling them a pretender after looking at the facts would be an exercise in stubborn narrative building.