It is a murky gaze to look back in time, the glorious smoke of today’s Playoff fireworks effortlessly obscures the NBA’s events from just one month ago. Yet that was the highlight of the Lakers season. We saw a turn back the clock performance from an all time great, reaching to the depths of his stamina reserves and flooring the gas pedal until the car could go no further. Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in his final game, still impressive, but encapsulated in time, that moment seems far further past than it is. The league has moved forward, there’s a championship on the line and their will be little lamenting of regular season casualties. Yet one more upcoming date remains, anxiously awaited by Los Angeles’s premiere franchise and their fans. On Tuesday, May 17th the NBA will conduct it’s draft lottery to see where the league’s less competitive teams will be selecting. For the Lakers, this is more important than ever.
Let’s get one thing out of the way now. The endeavor that was “Kobe’s Final Season,” was a ruse. The farewell to one of the Lakers’ greatest players was little more than a masquerade, disguising the full strength tanking effort the team was implementing. The Lakers were clearly at a turning point, the ominous, domineering figure that was Kobe Bryant, prevented true youth development and his salary, roadblocked major personnel movement. For years the idea of pairing with Kobe was a pinnacle selling point to free agent suitors, more recently it became the asterisked clause, the muttered fact that would hopefully be misheard. But now he’s gone and with him all the pageantry and unending media focus. Now the next step in the franchise’s evolution can commence. Or can it?
The Lakers’ coveted first round pick, acquired by way of the second worst record in the league, should net a young valuable player… for someone. In a complicated series of moves stemming back from the 2012 acquisition of Steve Nash, the rights to LA’s first round pick has bounced around the league for a few years and now settles into place. Should their draft allotment fall within the top three, the Lakers will retain their pick, should it fall out of that range, which it has a 45% chance of doing, it will belong to none other than the Philadelphia 76ers. A fruitless season, mired in humiliating defeats and infinite scrutiny could potentially yield no benefit. “Get bad to get good,” so often the technique employed by numerous teams, but a painful season is simpler to stomach when there’s a pot of Laker-yellow gold at the end of the rainbow. To start over again would be asking a lot of the impatient fanbase.
The Lakers did make an interesting coaching move when they fired Byron Scott, a man whose hiring many saw as the appointing of the captain to sink the ship. The team subsequently hired Golden State Warrior’s assistant coach and former Laker, Luke Walton. In regards to quality of coaching, Walton is a tough read to say the least. Sure, he shepherded the Warriors in Kerr’s absence for the first half of this season, pretty well I might add. Didn’t we all just think he was following Kerr’s explicit instructions when took to the bench though? Not that that’s a bad thing necessarily, but we know little of his abilities when not under the umbrella of a previously instituted, successful framework. Walton could bring that framework with him and try to crowbar the current Lakers into it, maybe it could work. However, as we’ve seen with other teams emulating Golden State, when you don’t have their players and their coaching, you can put a jersey on a pig, but its still a pig.
There’s alway free agency right? The Lakers have a ton of cap space and are a desirable destination, but almost every team in the league has cap space and the lure of Hollywood ain’t what it used to be. With numerous emerging media possibilities and increased revenue streams, the smaller markets are finding themselves in a competitive position. The calls of LA and New York have lured no responders the past few years. Lets also just note that D’Angelo Russell isn’t helping the Lakers cause here.
The Lakers could retain their pick, they could even move up to number one and get Ben Simmons who could turn out to be a marvelous player, Walton could be the mastermind coach of the next generation and marquis talent could once again flock to LA. But the opposite could also be true. The Lakers are indeed a team in flux, they’re headed in a direction, which way that will be should be a little clearer on Tuesday.
