Are the Los Angeles Lakers Taking LeBron James for Granted?

Not 24 hours after the Los Angeles Lakers dropped to 0-4 on the season, LeBron James posted a kind-of-cryptic-but-not-totally Instagram caption Thursday that has reading-between-the-lines super sleuths buzzing.

"How long will you be taken for granted.....💭👑. Keep going kid."

Perhaps this caption is a code for absolutely nothing. Maybe it's an innocuous nod to the picture of a 37-year-old soaring through the air, defying age and gravity and, by extension, science. This post might be his way of saying, "Nobody appreciates what I'm doing, at my age, at this level, nearly enough." And he'd be right. His longevity is acknowledged and cherished, but there is no fully comprehending or treasuring his lastingness.

Counterpoint: Yeah, no, that's not what this caption is doing. It can't be. The timing is too incidental to be coincidental. He's sending a message. He has to be.

The 2022-23 Lakers are spiraling, and LeBron, it seems, is fed up. And on the surface, he has every right to be.

Next season isn't a given for LeBron. He turns 38 on Dec. 30, giving him precious little time to play meaningful basketball, no matter how much of a generational anomaly his aging curve remains. But the Lakers are nowhere near playing meaningful basketball, let alone actually sniffing title contention.

Sure, four games doesn't have to be profoundly telltale. But Los Angeles' winless start is merely the sum of all its longstanding flaws actualized.

Russell Westbrook remains a putrid fit on offense. Trading for him while also bankrupting their wing depth during the 2021 offseason was an obviously bad decision then and it looks even worse now.

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To what extent Russ deserves blame is questionable. He hasn't reinvented himself on offense as a high-volume ball-screener or spot-up threat. That's also not a surprise. He didn't undergo functional facelifts in Oklahoma City or Houston or Washington. Expecting him to dramatically change in Los Angeles, nearly 15 years into his career, is an irrational hope. It's a minor miracle he's played so hard on defense this season, if we're being honest.

None of which means he's above critique. Before suffering a hamstring injury that held him out of the Lakers' loss to the Denver Nuggets on Wednesday, he was shooting 8.3 percent from deep and 35.8 percent on twos. Both marks would be career lows.

Between his gargantuan salary ($47.1 million), critically bad offensive play and overall fit, Westbrook has received a lion's share of the blame, as if his very presence is the lone barrier separating the Lakers from contention or, at the bare minimum, not sucking.

It's not.

The Lakers as a team are shooting a league-worst 22.7 percent from three and rank dead last in points scored per possession overall. That's not all Russ. Everyone shares in the bricklaying.

Anthony Davis has verged on dominant for stretches but followed up last year's sub-19-percent clip from three with...another sub-19-percent clip from three. Kendrick Nunn is a career 36.1 percent shooter from deep and currently nailing 23.5 percent of his treys while also having notched more fouls (seven) and turnovers (nine) than assists (six).

Patrick Beverley is a career 37.6 percent three-point sniper yet presently joins AD in the sub-19-percent club. LeBron himself is banging in just 25.7 percent of his triples, which would be a career low. Lonnie Walker IV is second on the Lakers in three-point attempts...which he's burying at a 17.4 percent clip.

Merely removing Westbrook from the equation solves little. He wasn't on the floor when the Lakers lost to the Nuggets, and their lineups in which LeBron and AD play without him on the season remain offensive clunkfests and net negatives.

Anyone bellowing obscenities at Russ from the stands or behind the protection of an avatar-less social media account is 1) overdue for some serious soul-searching and 2) misplacing most of the blame. The Lakers are not built by Westbrook or in the image of Westbrook. They were assembled by general manager Rob Pelinka and the rest of the front office.

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A majority of the outrage must be directed there, across so many different fronts. Pelinka and company's cardinal sin remains the same: They watched the Lakers win a title in 2020 by surrounding LeBron and AD with complementary shooting and defenders and then decided, not a full year later, to dismantle that nucleus in favor of what Westbrook might possibly, potentially be able to do when one of the two greatest basketball players of all time wasn't on the floor.

That is water-tight logic. So is letting Alex Caruso, one of their most important defenders, walk in free agency on a contract that was neither egregious nor outside their price range. With one of the GOAT candidates on their roster, still playing like a superstar, the Lakers acted like a small-market franchise.

Equally inexcusable: Doing so little in the aftermath of last year's implosion. Yes, the Lakers turned over their supporting cast, but only because most of that supporting cast is now out of the NBA. There's nothing noble about steering into decisions made for you, or for stockpiling largely ball-dominant guards.

Almost everyone's favorite pastime is now leaking Westbrook trades the Lakers could have made but didn't. That is damning. It suggests a complete lack of urgency in the face of an extremely urgent situation: LeBron's timeline. He should absolutely be pushing them to make a move, any move, just for the sake of increasing the meaning behind their largely purposeless basketball.

Indeed, the cost of doing so is prohibitive. Trading 2027 and 2029 first-rounders that (likely) post-date the LeBron era is dangerous.

It's one thing if those two picks ended up bagging them Kyrie Irving or another star. It's entirely different to punt on such a massive portion of your future in exchange for Myles Turner and Buddy Hield or Josh Richardson and Jakob Poeltl or Terry Rozier and Gordon Hayward.

The Lakers' current dilemma doesn't help matters. They are so deeply broken beyond the Westbrook fit they might be irreparable. Why mortgage crucial assets just to not contend and, potentially, eat into this summer's cap space?

Because. You. Have. LeBron. James.

Patience isn't a virtue, not in this case. The Lakers waiting for the trade market to expand doesn't ensure they'll have access to superior deals. Better options will incite more competition. And their best package, while steep for them, can be easily outstripped by teams capable of conveying a first-round pick sooner than five drafts from now.

Urgency is at once obligatory and essential. The Lakers haven't shown it. They've done everything but. They've made head coach Frank Vogel the scapegoat. They hired head coach Darvin Ham at least in part because he sold them on making it work with Russ, yet again implying he is the lone obstacle they must overcome.

Amid all these missteps over the past year-and-change, the Lakers extended Pelinka, for some reason, even though he's the architect of perhaps the NBA's most disjointed roster. That's worth another few dozen or so kind-of-cryptic-but-not-totally Instagram captions from LeBron itself. What's left of his window is being squandered, and Pelinka, along with all the other folks upstairs, including Jeanie Buss, should be thoroughly blamed for being so slow or unwilling to appropriately act.

And yet, while the Lakers are no question taking LeBron for granted, he is not beyond culpability. He reportedly pushed for the team to acquire Westbrook in the first place. It is Pelinka's job to override that input whenever necessary, but we can't pretend LeBron has been a voiceless bystander.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

What's more, unless the Lakers promised to jettison Westbrook before the start of this season and then reneged at the last second, LeBron signed a two-year extension knowing this was the roster on which he'd be playing. That is eyes-wide-open behavior, and it must factor into the Blame Game currently being played.

Still, even with this in mind, the mess that is this season and team falls at the feet of Pelinka and the front office.

It doesn't matter if LeBron wanted Russ. And it doesn't matter if the Lakers are so far gone it actually doesn't make sense to ship out their draft picks. Trade the picks anyway. Get better now. Figure out how to reload the war chest later. AD and LeBron trades will be on the table in the coming years if the direction goes belly up again.

Pelinka and Co. pivoted away from a proven blueprint into aimless territory more than a year ago, and they've yet to even sort of pull themselves out of the resulting free fall. That is franchise malpractice.

And so, LeBron will soon turn 38, somehow still performing at a level high enough to contend for titles, on a team run by a front office that, frankly, doesn't seem to give a damn.

Unless otherwise noted, stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference, Stathead or Cleaning the Glass and accurate entering Thursday's games. Salary information via Spotrac.

Dan Favale covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes.