Los Angeles Lakers' Biggest X-Factors for 2014-15 Season
With training camp looming, the Los Angeles Lakers are looking to acclimate a new head coach, blend new and returning players and turn the page on a disappointing chapter.
The 2014-15 season promises to have more X-factors than usual. What are these things, and how are they typically defined?
In the simplest of terms, an X-factor can be a wild card or some type of variable—be it a player, quality, circumstance or thing—that can have a significant impact on the team’s performance on whole.
For the past two seasons, there have been too many undesirable variables, from injuries to the mismatching of Mike D’Antoni’s free-flowing, small-ball offense with post-centric players like Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and Jordan Hill.
Now, with Byron Scott manning the sidelines and Bryant back after a long layoff, the team is hoping to put a disastrous 27-55 season behind them.
X-Factor: The Return of Kobe Bryant
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Nobody can question the greatness of Kobe Bryant's career. A five-time NBA champion and the Lakers’ all-time scoring leader, the Mamba is still the most driven player in basketball.
But he’s coming off two serious injuries—a ruptured Achilles tendon and a broken knee bone.
Bryant hasn’t appeared in a game since injuring his knee against the Memphis Grizzlies on December 17, 2013. That’s a long time to be away from the game.
If the Lakers are going to be a playoff contender in a strong Western Conference, they’ll need Bryant to be not just good, but great again.
Per Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News, new Lakers coach Byron Scott says of the 36-year-old star, “He’s gotten older, but can still get it done. I see a guy who’s going to average 20-something points per game, will have a great year and have a lot of people eating crow.”
Bryant will play fewer minutes this season in order to preserve his legs and will do a lot of scoring from the elbows and post-ups. But make no mistake, the excellence that was once taken for granted has now become an X-factor.
X-Factor: Steve Nash’s Health
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When the Lakers acquired Steve Nash during the summer of 2012, they felt they had filled their main point guard need for the next few years.
That’s not to say they expected the veteran would still play at his former MVP level—he was long in the tooth even then. What they could not have predicted, however, is that Nash would fracture his leg, leading to an escalating series of interrelated nerve and back issues so severe that he would play just 15 games last season.
Now, after a summer of training and soccer, Nash finally appears ready for full-time duty again. However, at age 40, the future Hall of Famer’s health, role and effectiveness are an open question.
Recently, Bill Oram for the Orange County Register tweeted, “Byron on Steve Nash: He’s in the gym every morning, says he feels better than he’s ever felt over the last two years. Unsure if Nash starts.”
It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if Nash were to anchor the bench unit, delivering his signature pinpoint passes to scorers like Nick Young.
The biggest X-factor for Nash isn’t if he starts or not, but whether he can stay healthy enough to contribute on a consistent basis.
X-Factor: The Princeton Offense
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This season, Byron Scott will blend aspects of the Princeton offense that he has used throughout his coaching career with similar principles from Phil Jackson’s triangle offense.
As Scott said in his introductory presser, per Lakers.com:
"The Princeton offense, you have to know how to play the game of basketball. It's like the triangle, a lot of similarities. I know that Kobe's very familiar with it. But there's different varieties to the Princeton offense. There's like five different sets that you can call the Princeton offense. And we won't get into all of them, and we won't even try to work on all of them.
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Not wanting to overwhelm the team with an unfamiliar methodology, Scott will add plenty of easy pick-and-roll sets as well as allow players to freelance at times.
However, the core components—the Princeton and the triangle—are systems that rely on players moving constantly without the ball. This will pose some real challenges at the point guard position. Steve Nash, Jeremy Lin and Jordan Clarkson are all at their best with the ball in their hands.
In this year’s offense, all five players on the floor become part of an equal opportunity, read-and-react system. For Kobe Bryant, it will be a return to an old school of thought that he’s quite familiar with.
For the rest of the team, however, the Princeton offense will be an X-factor.
X-Factor: Offensive Players in a Defensive Scheme
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Carlos Boozer may gobble up a lot of easy rebounds, but he’s not known as a defensive stopper. Nick Young will score all day long, but the other end of the court has never been his best friend.
Also, Jeremy Lin, Julius Randle and Ryan Kelly all tend to flourish more with the ball in their hands than when defending against it. As for Steve Nash, do we even have to have this conversation?
Yet defense will be a first priority under Byron Scott, who said, per Lakers.com, “The main thing I have to do right away is establish ourselves as a defensive basketball team. Offense is going to come and go, but you control your effort on the defensive end every night, and we obviously have to get that back in the plans.”
This flies in the face of the past two seasons under Mike D’Antoni, who was all about offense being the best form of defense—simply score the ball more than the other guys. That didn't work out so good. Per Basketball-Reference.com, the team ranked second in pace, but gave up 109.2 points per game—more than any other team in the league except the Philadelphia 76ers.
Scott’s challenge is getting his players to buy into aspects of the game that are not their strong suit. He'll rely on a lot of helping the helper—in other words, teammates covering for each other, putting out the extra effort and trying to make it less comfortable for opposing players to dribble-penetrate.
One of the X-factors this season will be whether offensive-style players will put out the energy and commitment on the other end of the floor.
Because even if they aren’t natural defenders, the effort alone will have a collective, positive effect.
X-Factor: The Arrival of Linsanity?
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One of the Lakers’ biggest needs over the offseason was landing a dependable point guard for the future.
In July, the team completed a trade with the Houston Rockets that could go a long way toward solving their dilemma while also maintaining future financial flexibility. They swapped the rights to an obscure past draft pick—Sergei Lishchuk—for Jeremy Lin, a future first-round pick and a 2015 second-round pick.
Essentially, the Lakers agreed to foot the bill for Lin’s $15 million salary this season, of which only $8 million counts against their cap.
It’s a solid deal on paper—the Lakers get an intriguing test drive, an expiring contract and two future draft picks. But it could turn out to be much more than that.
As Kevin Ding wrote for Bleacher Report in July, obtaining the point guard was not only a sensible move, but one that could potentially pay huge dividends:
"Lin is still an inconsistent shooter dependent on driving to the rim, but Linsanity showed undeniable peak ability—which is why the Rockets overpaid to get him. He turns 26 next month—on the exact same day Bryant turns 36—and will get a chance to play more than ever and make or break his career with the Lakers.
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For his part, Lin isn’t seeking to relive the famous catchword that was born of a brief but incandescent run with the New York Knicks in 2012.
During his introductory press conference, per Lakers.com, the point guard stated, “I’m not trying to recreate Linsanity or be that phenomenon that happened in New York. I just want to be myself more than ever.”
But regardless of the meaning of a word, it was Lin’s stellar play with the Knicks that led to a media storm that still has legs. And if he can play that well in Los Angeles, his star will burn brightly again.
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