Could Los Angeles Lakers Rival Philadelphia 76ers for NBA Futility?
The Los Angeles Lakers aren't the Philadelphia 76ers, nor are they trying to be.
Unlike the Sixers, the Lakers didn't spend their summer hoarding cap space, scrounging for second-round picks, signing NBA D-Leaguers to throwaway deals and drafting guys they didn't anticipate seeing in action until 2015. Instead, L.A. went hard after marquee free agents, snatched up veterans on reasonable deals and drafted a rookie, in Julius Randle, who looked the part of an immediate contributor—all in an attempt to live up to not only Kobe Bryant's lofty standards but also those of the organization and its antsy fanbase.
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Some good it's done them so far. The Lakers emerged winless from their four-games-in-five-nights set to open the 2014-15 campaign. That wouldn't be so bad, in light of the quality of competition they faced, if not for Randle suffering a season-ending broken leg in Game 1.
And that's all after Steve Nash had to call it quits on account of his balky back before the opening tip against the Houston Rockets.
Despite their best and honest efforts to win basketball games, the Lakers now find themselves out West in precisely the same place the Sixers are in the East: buried at the bottom of the standings, without a victory to stand on. Never have the Lakers started this poorly since they've been in L.A.; they last owned an 0-4 record back in 1957-58, when they were still based in Minneapolis.
What, pray tell, is going to prevent L.A. from winding up across the cellar from Philly at the end, too?
The schedule certainly won't. If anything, the 78 games remaining on the Lakers' slate would seem the biggest driver of whatever futility is to come.
As is the case with every club in the West, the Lakers are obligated to spend most of their schedule battling within the NBA's superior conference. They still have 48 games remaining against Western Conference opponents, as opposed to a mere 30 (i.e. two tangles with each of the other 15 teams) opposite the East.
That, in itself, could drag L.A. into a Philly-esque abyss.
To be sure, the Lakers look to be quite terrible in their own right, as well. Through four games, L.A. rates as a borderline bottom-10 offense in terms of points scored per 100 possessions.
Those same metrics, courtesy of NBA.com, also peg the Lakers as the league's worst defensive team—by a hefty margin. Thus far, the Lakers have surrendered 120.2 points per 100 possessions. The next worst mark? The Brooklyn Nets, who've allowed 110.6.
That gap figures to narrow over time, as the disparities in schedule strength even out and the Lakers get their cracks at some of the league's lesser lights. But it's not as though the rest of the results are any more encouraging for the Purple and Gold.
Three blowouts in four outings have left them with the worst overall rating in the NBA (minus-19.6 points per 100 possessions). They're dead-last in both defensive field-goal percentage (.505) and transition points given up (21.2 per game) and 28th in three-point percentage allowed (.436). Without much in the way of a front line, the Lakers also rank among the bottom 10 in rebounding percentage and have allowed their opponents to convert an unsightly 66.1 percent of their field-goal attempts at the rim, albeit while allowing the fewest such attempts in the Association.
"Defensively, we’ve just got to get tougher and we’ve got to get a little bit more grittier," said head coach Byron Scott, via The Los Angeles Daily News' Mark Medina. "Sometimes we lose focus after we score and all of a sudden we relax."
| Defensive Efficiency | 120.2 | 30th |
| Net Rating | -19.6 | 30th |
| Rebounding Percentage | 47.6 | 22nd |
| Opponent Field-Goal Percentage | 50.5 | 30th |
| Opponent Three-Point Percentage | 43.6 | 27th |
| Opponent Effective Field-Goal Percentage | 58.7 | 30th |
| Opponent Free-Throw Rate | 0.453 | 30th |
| Opponent Offensive Rebounding Percentage | 28.7 | 24th |
These are hardly new problems for the Lakers. They finished the 2013-14 season under Mike D'Antoni ranked 28th in points allowed per 100 possessions and 30th in rebounding percentage, and they languished among the bottom third of the league in most other meaningful defensive metrics.
That isn't likely to change any time soon, not with the frontcourt rotation limited to the likes of Jordan Hill, Carlos Boozer, Ed Davis and Robert Sacre. "Our bigs got to do a better job," Scott went on. "You’re playing against teams like this that run multiple pick-and-rolls, if we’re trying to trap it, our bigs got to be up there. If we’re trying a hard show, our bigs got to get up there."
It doesn't help that those bigs have to cover for the porous perimeter efforts of a 36-year-old Bryant and Jeremy Lin, who's never been mistaken for a defensive dynamo at the point.
This isn't to suggest that the Sixers have been much better on either end than have their Western Conference counterparts. Philly's offense has turned out an awful 89.5 points per 100 possessions—easily the lowest mark in the league. Its defense, though, has been passable, with 102.2 points yielded per 100 possessions.
The Sixers, at least, can count on young legs and scrappy approaches from their hodgepodge of a roster. They also benefit, to some extent, from their most promising prospect (Nerlens Noel) and their best and only veteran (Luc Richard Mbah a Moute) sharing defensive leanings.
Let's not get too wound up in these results, though, for better or worse. We're talking about inordinately small samples, drawn from three or four games at the outset of a schedule that's packed with 82 of them.
"We can't get discouraged by it," Bryant told Yahoo Sports' Marc J. Spears. "It's a very long season. You just have to stay the course. Keep on looking to improve, keep on looking to get better and things will eventually break."
Hopefully, not in an injurious way, either. The Lakers were bound to struggle out of the gate, in part due to the growing pains that come with the arrival of a new coach. Scott's intense practices, emphasis on physicality and philosophical skepticism of three-pointers are practically polar opposites to those guidelines put in place during D'Antoni's abbreviated tenure.
As bad as the Lakers may be, they won't have to play every game against the likes of the Houston Rockets, Phoenix Suns, Golden State Warriors or even the rival Los Angeles Clippers, each of whom they've already faced. Nor will they always be as short-handed as they are at present.
Nick Young will be back to bolster L.A.'s bench scoring before too long. Ryan Kelly should see the floor relatively soon. As devastating as Randle's injury is for the franchise's future, the Lakers can at least count on the presence of two other productive players (Boozer and Davis) at power forward.
Those guys are all legitimate NBA players. So, too, are Bryant, Lin, Hill, Ronnie Price, Wayne Ellington, Xavier Henry and Wesley Johnson. That may seem like a pointlessly low bar, but compared to the Sixers—who boast but one healthy body (Mbah a Moute) of any significant repute—the Lakers are in pretty darn good shape, roster-wise.
Of course, this distinction might not matter in the end. Both teams are fated to spend the coming months slavering through their respective slates with only marginal talent, at best. As Deadspin's Albert Burneko put it, the Lakers look to be more than a few ingredients shy of whipping up a palatable on-court product:
"The Lakers' two best players, in some order or another, are Jordan Hill and the mummy who used to be Kobe Bryant. Their third best player does not exist. The Lakers have hot dogs and canned tomato soup, and Byron Scott wants to make the Showtime Lakers of the 1980s out of them.
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Comparing these teams isn't quite so much an exercise of apples and oranges as it is one of rotten fruit all around. The biggest difference is that one (the Sixers) has already begun burying the resultant seeds while the other (the Lakers) is still waiting for the rest of the fruit to decay while hoping against hope that the whole tree hasn't spoiled.
To that end, the Lakers could stand to benefit as handsomely from their own well-intentioned failure as the Sixers will from their obvious tank job. The 2015 NBA draft could be another talent bonanza, with a number of blue-chip prospects—including post players Jahlil Okafor and Karl-Anthony Towns, point guard Emmanuel Mudiay and L.A. native Stanley Johnson—expected to wind up at or near the top.
So long as the Lakers' pick lands in the top five, they'll get to keep it. Otherwise, the Suns will reap the reward sewn by L.A.'s sorrows.
That may not be enough to buck up the spirits of sad Lakers fans through what figures to be another depressing campaign, but at least they can be "festively jovial"—if only sarcastically so for now—about the thought of a future with another lottery pick to pair with a healthy Randle as the cornerstones of the team's impending (if not ongoing) rebuild.
Not unlike how the Sixers and their fans probably feel about their passel of young players.
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