LeBron James' first season in the purple and gold was never supposed to end like this: With a fully cleaned house, either from their own volition (Magic Johnson) or not (Luke Walton).
When cameras at the Staples Center filmed LeBron telling his buddy, Dwyane Wade, after their final game against each other that "it was either here or the Garden -- that's it," surely he never had in his mind that picking the Lakers could have gone so poorly.
And yet here's the carnage after one LeBron season in Los Angeles:
One Lakers legend, Magic Johnson, who decided to resign as president of basketball operations instead of lead the NBA's marquee franchise.One up-and-coming head coach, Luke Walton, who was shown the door.One strained groin for LeBron, which caused him to miss 17 games, a stint during which the Lakers dropped from fourth in the West (2.5 games out of first) to ninth in the West (10.5 games out of first).One fired trainer after the team's injury-filled season.One very public, very bungled attempt to pair LeBron with Anthony Davis.One very confused young Lakers core -- Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Lonzo Ball and Josh Hart -- who spent the better part of a month in limbo, ping-ponging between being part of the Lakers' future and being put on the next jet to New Orleans.In other words, it's all been one giant shipwreck.
It may not be an overstatement to say that one NBA team's season has never begun with such hype and expectation before ending in such all-encompassing disarray.
Yet as the saying goes: With every crisis comes opportunity.
That's what Lakers owner Jeanie Buss finds herself with during their long offseason: An opportunity to take this disaster and turn it into something great.
The Lakers have not been on a roll lately. Over the past six seasons – which marks how long it's been since they last made the playoffs, which is, amazingly, the third-longest current playoff drought in the NBA -- the Lakers have the worst combined record in the NBA. But last season things seemed to be getting incrementally better. The Lakers won 35 games, which is not great, but it was the most games they had won since they'd last made the playoffs. Walton coached the young group into having the league's 13th-rated defense. They were fast and fun -- really fun! -- with the third-quickest pace in the NBA. Sure, it would take continued development of these youngsters, plus a marquee free agency addition or two, but you could see a way forward to restore the Lakers' glory.
That is not what happened. In LeBron's first year, the Lakers won two more games from the year before, but lost every bit of momentum. It was the furthest thing from fun.
Luckily, Buss still finds herself in a pretty decent spot.
She still has the second-greatest basketball player ever on the payroll for three more seasons. LeBron may not be at the peak of his powers, but he's still LeBron. She still has that young core; they may have taken a collective step backwards this season, and they may remain disenchanted by how LeBron treated them, but these four players are still loaded with potential. And she still has those six letters: "L-A-K-E-R-S." Even though in recent years the NBA has seen its power centers become more diffuse than ever, and places like San Antonio and Cleveland and Oklahoma City and Milwaukee have become some of the primary focuses of the basketball universe, the Lakers are still the Lakers. That may not matter as much now as it did a generation ago. But those six letters still matter.
Buss now has a chance for a do-over. The head-coaching vacancy is an important decision to make. ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported Friday that Ty Lue is a "strong frontrunner" for the job, and that Sixers assistant Monty Williams is in the mix as well. Both would be men that LeBron has a history with, and would please the franchise's star.
But the most important change Buss must make is in the front office, when she decides who will replace Magic. The single biggest issue that detonated these Lakers, even more than the muscle that went pop in LeBron's groin, was roster construction. Can you imagine if the Lakers had retained Brook Lopez and Julius Randle from last year's team? It's not as if they couldn't have signed those two. Lopez signed a one-year, $3.3 million deal with the Milwaukee Bucks that ended up being a central part of that team's face lift around Giannis. Randle signed a two-year, $17.7 million deal with the New Orleans Pelicans and then had the best season of his career, averaging 21.4 points and 8.7 rebounds while developing a capable 3-point shot (34 percent). Can you imagine if the front office had surrounded LeBron with teammates who made sense to surround LeBron with?
Instead, Magic and GM Rob Pelinka surrounded LeBron with non-shooting veterans on one-year deals. It never made sense from the start.
That's the silver lining for the Lakers: The players on this roster who made no sense to be on this roster are finished. The one-year contracts are all gone: Rajon Rondo and JaVale McGee and Lance Stephenson and Michael Beasley and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (although at least Caldwell-Pope made a bit of sense).
Whomever Buss selects to run this shop will have one lottery pick (hey, maybe all this is solved by Zion!) and a whole bunch of cap space with which to form a roster that makes sense around LeBron. Maybe the Lakers don't land one of those elite free agents; it sure doesn't sound like that's in the cards. But it's the NBA, and in the NBA, anything can happen.
Buss now has one shot to make things right and pick the right person for the job. Because if Buss doesn't hit on this one, it's entirely possible that LeBron's entire four-year career with the Lakers will be remembered in a similar fashion to Michael Jordan's end-of-career stint with the Washington Wizards: Utterly and completely forgettable. Or an unmitigated disaster.
And those two things are the worst things that could happen.
