I’m So Sorry To Tell You This But The Lakers Must Be Taken Seriously

For the majority of the NBA season, there has been an odd, Los Angeles Lakers–shaped hole at the center of the conversation.

Chalk it up to Victor Wembanyama blocking out the sun, the feel-good Detroit Pistons, the feel-bad Los Angeles Clippers, or the gambling scandal that cast a pall over the proceeding five months of hoops, but there simply has not been that much to say about the Lakers, a blessed idyll for anyone who has had to endure national TV broadcasts and podcast segments discussing Rui Hachimura with a tone of grave seriousness. LeBron James, widely expected to hit the exit this summer, has just sort of been hanging around, while Austin Reaves got hurt at exactly the wrong time for what was looking like a fun outsider all-star candidacy. DeAndre Ayton, per an inevitable Dave McMenamin story, is exactly the moody weirdo everyone convinced themselves he wasn’t when he signed with L.A. The most interesting thing that happened to them was Rich Paul floating a trade on his bad podcast.

Yet preceding any of these shrug-inducing truths was a caveat, something like Yes, Luka Doncic is amazing, but. Lurking within the striving, flawed Lakers was the most unstoppable pick-and-roll operator in basketball. Not that Doncic’s genius with the ball helped the Lakers look like anything better than the least threatening of the six legit teams in the Western Conference (until the Kevin Durant group chat fiasco) or kept Doncic himself from having a pissy, telegenically abrasive season. This year felt like a gap year, the last middling Luka Doncic team until the albatross of LeBron James’s contract and stature let the Lakers really build the team around their prize from the Nico Harrison boondoggle.

That is, until the past month, in which Doncic has been the best player in basketball and the Lakers look more like real contenders than fake ones. Move your ass on over Wemby. As much as it pains me to say it, the Lakers are back.

The primary reason is that Doncic has been completely unplayable. Over the course of an eight-game streak in which he’s averaging more than 40 points and his team is undefeated—extended Thursday night by a personal 60-spot in a 134-126 win over the Miami Heat—opponents have tried just about everything: Isolating their best defender on him, springing early doubles in an effort to dislodge the ball, springing late doubles in an effort to induce a sense of panic, going under screens to keep him out of the lane, going over screens to keep him from bombing away, and choking him. None of it is working.

No coverage can contain Doncic in the pick and roll; neither can great individual defense. The number of times a very good defender will stick with his every feint, jab, and shove and then offer a perfect contest only for Doncic to roll over one of his shoulders at 0.8x speed and lazily drop in a perfect 18-footer is staggering. If a guy as ferocious as Miami’s Davion Mitchell can pin Doncic into a nine-inch strip by the sideline and force him into a contested fall-away shot, and Doncic can still swish it no problem, what is anyone supposed to do?

Nothing, really, is what. Doncic was outrageous against the Heat, getting his 60 points on just 30 shots despite having landed in Miami at 5 a.m. Thursday morning.

That performance followed an overtime game-winner against the Denver Nuggets and a hilariously mean-spirited shotmaking display against Houston. And by Houston I mean not just the Rockets but the very city of Houston, as Doncic spent a spiteful fourth quarter talking pointed shit to fans in the crowd. When asked what he said to a particularly boisterous heckler, Doncic said only, “It was in English. I made sure he understood it.”

There was no ambiguity to Doncic’s 60-ball either. He was undeniable, then later, “tired as shit.” Anyone would be after scoring 19 points in the third quarter and then 20 in the fourth to beat a surging Heat team.

Afterwards, Lakers coach JJ Redick noted that Doncic has elevated the play of his teammates. As great as Doncic has been, a critical element to the story of the Lakers’ success over the past three weeks has been the team finally finding its ideal form. LeBron James has finally settled fully into the elder statesman role in L.A., setting screens, getting his shots in transition, and filling all the interstices that every team with two ball-dominant lead guards needs filled. Anyone who has watched LeBron seriously as far back as like 2009 could tell you that he’s been as well-positioned as any star ever to age gracefully into a secondary or tertiary role, thanks to his size and unmatched ability to read the game. Anyone who watched LeBron last year, by contrast, could tell you one of the Lakers’ primary impediments was James’s unwillingness to cede control.

He’s done it, which can’t have been easy but has been spectacular. James unlocks Reaves and Doncic, enables Marcus Smart to get more aggressive, and pushes forward the somehow successful (so far) plan to turn DeAndre Ayton into a normal guy. He’s still posting decent counting stats, but doing so on sterling effiency. Against Houston, James showed the benefits of running an offense that mostly gets him the ball with a pre-made advantage, as he hit 13 of 14 shots, six of them dunks.

“[LeBron] was awesome tonight and I think two, part of the evolution of him on this team has been, particularly in this stretch, it’s just been his patience,” Redick said. “His patience, knowing he’s going to get the ball and he’s going to have transition opportunities and he’s going to have plays called for him.” That’s what you say about a guy who is sacrificing to win. As jarring as it can be to see LeBron James in a position where less of him is better for the team, it’s coherent with the story of his career. He’s a winner, and what he’s doing is helping his team win.

I give LeBron a great deal of the credit for the Ayton reclamation project, which is in a very good place right now. After being left to molder in closing scenarios in favor of Jaxson Hayes and the ghost of Maxi Kleber, Ayton has finally started doing the dirty work instead of sulking when he doesn’t get 20 possessions with which to do dumb stuff on the block.

“I just started looking in the mirror and said ‘Yo bro, … you’re not that guy. You don’t need to be on this team doing that at all,'” Ayton said after the Rockets win. “And I’m having fun with it, I’m not gonna lie.” Coach after coach has tried and failed to teach Ayton that exact lesson, but it doesn’t feel like a leap to imagine that Ayton seeing an era-defining player give up control of the ball so zero-time all-star Austin Reaves can have more freedom would motivate him to do the same.

The question with this Lakers team will always be its defense. Specifically, will their offensive brilliance offset the shakiness of their defense with both Reaves and Doncic on the floor? Increasingly, that seems like a winning proposition. I will note that for Doncic’s lapses of effort and career-long indifference toward moving his feet sideways, his Mavericks teams tended to defend better in the playoffs. Redick called him a “defensive savant,” which he probably intended as a full-on compliment but actually works better absent that word’s definitional creep toward meaning simply genius.

My point is, things might go really well for the Lakers in a month. You now have to take these guys seriously.