Lakers: How Current LA Roster Could Win The Title
The Los Angeles Lakers have had an erratic season. Any time they put together, say, a three-game winning streak, it is immediately countered by a three-game losing streak. They are an oddly star-studded .500 club at 16-16.
So how could this current, lackluster Lakers roster win the 2022 NBA title, without making any personnel changes?
The answer isn't particularly fun, but it has to be discussed.
As we have seen, the new novel coronavirus variant, Omicron, has run rampant across the NBA. It has decimated oodles of clubs, including your Lakers, compelling teams to pick up players not just out of the NBA G League but also the free agent scrap heap (40-year-old Joe Johnson, who hasn't appeared in a non-preseason NBA game since 2018, just signed a 10-day contract with the Detroit Pistons!).
The Lakers as currently comprised could absolutely win the NBA title... if their Western Conference competition was stuck in COVID-19 protocols during the playoffs.
No, this LA team is not at the championship level on its own merits. That much is abundantly clear. The club features All-Star forwards LeBron James and Anthony Davis (though Davis is gradually accepting that he's really more of a center), replacement-level starting point guard Russell Westbrook being paid about double his actual on-court value, not-quite-ready swingman Talen Horton-Tucker struggling to find consistency on both sides of the floor, and a bunch of minimum-salaried veterans.
James has looked tremendous on offense (though even there he has dipped a bit, when it comes to his rebounding and willingness to get to the charity stripe). Davis has produced at an All-Star level but no longer seems like the versatile full-court menace he was as recently as the Lakers' 2019-20 title-winning season. Westbrook and the veteran signings are well past their primes. THT is not ready.
But the league, in its dogged, greedy determination to play as many games as possible without disruption, seems hellbent on pressing forward with the 2021-22 NBA season without too many postponements. That has necessitated all these nutty 10-day contract additions. On that front, the Lakers may have added some scoring punch with their signing of veteran ex-All-Star point guard Isaiah Thomas, though he shares the defensive limitations of much of this LA roster.
Should coronavirus outbreaks on contending teams strike at the wrong time for the Lakers' opponents without impacting the Lakers in a comparably meaningful way, we could be seeing LeBron, AD and Russ tip off against, say, Brandon Knight (now with the Dallas Mavericks) or Emmanuel Mudiay (now with the Sacramento Kings). Seriously.
So yes, the absurdity of the NBA prioritizing cold hard cash over the health of its players is essentially this particular LA roster's main path to winning anything. It's stupid. But then again, so is the NBA's plan to just try to power its way through the season, by any means necessary, without at least imposing serious restrictions on crowd attendance across markets (i.e. mandated testing everywhere), modifying what players are permitted to do when they travel, or maybe even returning to a "bubble"-type environment. Short of that, it feels like at least a couple teams will see their lineups waylaid by an outbreak come spring.
Unfortunately, that's about the only way that the Lakers lineup that exists as of this writing could break through to collect the 2022 championship.
Otherwise, the team will have to get creative as the season progress when it comes to improving their championship odds through roster changes. Notions of trading Westbrook for Philadelphia 76ers malcontent Ben Simmons or flipping THT, Kendrick Nunn and future draft picks for Detroit Pistons forward Jerami Grant could do much to cure what ails LA. The Sixers and Pistons could probably fetch more for those players on the open market, however.
