Contrary to the championship-or-bust idea that dominates NBA discourse too often, Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James can hold his head high following his team's second-round exit in this year's playoffs. LeBron had a marvelous postseason individually, especially considering he was the best player on the court during the Lakers' first-round series victory over the Houston Rockets. At age 41, LeBron proved that his value still remains at a superstar level.
LeBron haters will sit back and mock his Lakers getting swept in the second round, but to do so is to ignore the clear truth that LA had no shot to defeat the Thunder this season, even if a healthy Luka Doncic had been on the floor, if we're being honest.
And speaking of honesty, that's exactly what LeBron himself exercised this week when he spoke about the Thunder series with Steve Nash on their Mind the Game podcast. Basically, James admitted that the Lakers lacked the roster talent to keep up with the Thunder, and that it's the clear explanation for why LA was sent home in the second round.
LeBron James believes the Thunder had too much talent for the Lakers to handle
“We were not out worked [by the Thunder]," James said. "They didn’t out-physical us. They didn’t outsmart us. I feel like we were just out-talented, you know, by OKC. They just possess so much more talent.”
If this was a brutal admission for LeBron to share about the Lakers-Thunder matchup (and about the nature of the NBA, in general, for that matter), it's also an accurate one. Too often, fans and analysts can get lost in the sauce of analytics, coaching matchups, and other narratives, forgetting that NBA games are -- at the end of the day -- won and lost by the players on the floor. And if one team possesses a deeper and more talented group of players than the other, it becomes a problem for the inferior roster that factors like hard work, physicality, or basketball IQ can't readily solve.
LeBron is correct -- the Thunder are a far deeper roster than the Lakers
Depth is the key piece here, and it's surprising that LeBron didn't use that word in his conversation with Nash, although he might as well have been alluding to it by the word "talent". Because it's not necessarily true that the Thunder's best two players on a given night are better than LeBron and Austin Reaves (although that may be true, especially with Reaves not at 100%), it's certainly fair to say that the Thunder simply have more talented players (in other words, more depth) than the Lakers.
Whereas the Lakers struggled mightily to get any production at all from their bench against the Thunder, OKC had the luxury of multiple bench players producing, most of all Jared McCain, who continues to show out in the Western Conference Finals, by the way.
They don't call LeBron one of the smartest basketball minds in the game for no reason. He assesses everything about the game -- his own team, the landscape of the league, player evaluation, and more -- with a clear head and a logical outlook. And it's that mindset that led LeBron to the basic conclusion that the defending champs were just too talented for the Lakers to handle, regardless of how much LA maximized its own roster.
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