- 44,833
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This is a lot like Lebron's first year with the Lakers. Offseason should be interesting
**LA LAKERS THREAD** Sitting on 17! 2023-2024 offseason begins
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by licensed to ball,
- Start date
- 88,746
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cant wait til the season resumes. enough of all this speculation bull ****.
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Listen to the first 13 minutes.
- 22,552
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no need to listen to it. Just re-read posts from common sense posters such as myself.
MVP
Supporter
- 82,977
- 85,441
We getting new statement jerseys next year, they're a lil better but those black panels on the side...still not a fan.
- 11,403
- 12,646
I'm clearly in the minority but i like the current purple joints.
darthska
Staff member
- 46,891
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- 13,083
Love the purple Jordan shorts to hoop in
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Don’t really pay too much attention to espn rankings and the top 75 stuff as it’s just useless gaebage
But imagine thinking Duncan was better than Kobe. Both in a player player comparison and a team comparison.
Lol. Nba media is such a joke
But imagine thinking Duncan was better than Kobe. Both in a player player comparison and a team comparison.
Lol. Nba media is such a joke
- 67,703
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This got me in my feels. Again.
- 22,584
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The current statement jerseys>those new ones.
- 18,730
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Players past and present consistently put him top 5, top 3 even. That means more than ESPN pundits.
Agree with you on. Duncan
I also don’t understand how Bird is supposedly better than Kobe. He was great, but come on now!
- 22,552
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March 1 is 6 days away and zero word on DJ and Baze being waived to bring in real nba players.
Lol. Jeanie ain’t spending 7 mill unless it guarentees a title. And y’all wanna worry about a team that the owners themselves don’t care about.
Lol. Jeanie ain’t spending 7 mill unless it guarentees a title. And y’all wanna worry about a team that the owners themselves don’t care about.
- 92,330
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Reinventing basketball: What the NBA might look like without 75 years of baggage
Over the course of its 75-year history, the NBA has carved out an incredible legacy that includes unforgettable moments, superstar players, iconic franchises and legendary coaches. Basketball is now the second-most popular sport in the world behind soccer, and the NBA is a big reason why.
But let's face it, the NBA is a boomer, and some of its conventions that date back to the 1940s are beginning to feel like baggage, and they will not help the best basketball league in the world continue to thrive as we race headlong deep into the 21st century.
It's worth asking: What would be different if the league were able to restart from scratch right now?
Given that the league is 75 years old, the lines on the floor, the rulebook, the timing, the court dimensions and the height and size of the hoop are nothing short of a triumph. These core elements are all almost identical to how they've been for decades and have mostly stood the test of time. The original architects of pro basketball mostly nailed it, but there are a few exceptions, both on and off the court. So what would the NBA change if it wasn't tied to the history and tradition of the sport?
On the court
If All-Star Weekend proved anything, it's that the endings of typical NBA games are not as fantastic as they should be.
As it stands, the last few minutes of a 48-minute tilt are often brutal. At the exact moment that excitement should be peaking, games are instead deformed by clock-slowing strategies that end up increasing both free throws and stoppages of play.
Nobody could have foreseen this 75 years ago, but the clock itself incentivizes these ugly tactics. The team that's ahead starts slowing down and milking time, while the trailing team starts fouling and hoisting up wild, rushed 3-pointers (which themselves didn't exist 75 years ago).
When LeBron James ended the All-Star Game with a beautiful fadeaway on Sunday in his hometown, the basketball world once again caught a glimpse of a better future. The Elam Ending, which assigns a target score after a preset amount of timed play, is simply a better approach, but nobody knew that 75 years ago. We know it now.
The league deserves credit for experimenting with these alternative endings during All-Star Weekend, but now that we've seen the positive results, it has to figure out how to get them into real games too, perhaps starting with the in-season tournament NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants to add to the schedule.
For those who argue that the timed game is the only way to do it: Go to any playground or pick-up game around the world and find one that uses a clock.
The NBA would be better off if its games were won by buckets, not by buzzers.
If you think the Elam Ending is too drastic of a change, remember this is the same league that suddenly inserted a field goal worth an extra point to its playing surface in the middle of its history. Big changes are possible.
The 3-point shot was designed to open up the game, and it has definitely worked. Pro basketball is faster and more open than ever, but the pioneers of the arc failed to anticipate the ability of today's shooters.
George Mikan didn't pull up from the logo. Bob Cousy didn't hit 40% of his 24-foot jumpers. Stephen Curry does, and the dimensions of the court -- 94 feet long by 50 feet wide, unchanged from the league's very first game in 1946 -- are one big reason the league can't adjust the 3-point line to challenge today's pros.
The current shape of the arc (which isn't fully an arc) tells you the original architects knew it was weird from the jump.
The "short corner" is currently 22 feet from the center of the rim, and the rest of the arc is 23.75 feet away. That doesn't make sense, but it does ensure shooters still have 3 feet of shooting space in between the 3-point line and the sideline in the corners. The 50-foot length of the baseline was perfect for a league with no 3-point shot, but in 2022, it boxes in the league's ability to extend the 3-point line.
The league's last attempt to "fix" this problem -- by moving the line in to 22 feet all around, making it an actual arc -- encouraged even the most unlikely 3-point shooters to fire away. A similar move now would simply exacerbate the league's transition beyond the arc. Curry, who drained a record 16 3s in Sunday's All-Star Game, has changed the league forever. But he also has shown that the current line placement is too easy for today's best shooters.
The average 2-point jump shot is now worth a measly 0.83 points. Meanwhile, the average corner 3 is now worth 1.13 points. In an era obsessed with data and efficiency, that massive gap is forcing teams to abandon things like elbow jumpers, fadeaways and post play that were once the signature plays of legends like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki.
While the obvious tweak would be to move the line back, that pesky 50-foot baseline has us boxed in. If the league could extend the width of the baselines by just 10 feet, it could reduce the cartoonish efficiency gap between 2-point and 3-point jump shooting, give these incredible athletes more space to fly around and reestablish the majesty of the midrange.
Unfortunately, NBA arenas are already built, season-ticket packages are already in place and even a 10-foot expansion would cost owners a few rows of those tasty lower bowl seats, not to mention cause design headaches for every arena manager in the league too. All because the sport remains played on a court designed more than 75 years ago.
Off the court
Back in the 20th century, the NBA was chasing popularity, and baseball was the national pastime. Many of the NBA's basic structural features were simply lifted from Major League Baseball, including the ideas for divisions and conferences.
While these groupings might have helped organize schedules and bus travel early on, they are now showing their age.
The geographic clustering of the 30 teams affects everything from our Finals matchups to who makes the All-Star Game.
Would Domantas Sabonis be a two-time All-Star if his Indiana Pacers had been a Western Conference team over the past two years? As absurd as that might seem, three of Indiana's divisional rivals -- the Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks -- were once Western Conference teams. The Memphis Grizzlies and New Orleans Pelicans are in the Western Conference despite being far closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific.
If the Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors clearly prove themselves to be the league's two best teams over 82 regular-season games, then why does the league's playoff format prevent them from meeting for the championship in June?
Many passionate NBA fans can't even name the league's six divisions, let alone which teams belong in each. Regardless, these old groupings still influence scheduling, which in turn affects things like playoff seeding and draft positioning.
Because the league's schedule is tied to its division and conference structure, it's hard to simply say those structures should be eliminated, but there's a fix for that too. Just last week, Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey suggested the league would be better off with a shorter regular season. The current 82-game schedule doesn't quite have 75 years of history attached to it (teams only played 60 games in 1946-47, and the schedule didn't expand to 82 until the late 1960s), and the idea of reducing the schedule has been floated regularly in recent years, particularly after three seasons (2011-12, 2019-20 and 2020-21) saw teams play fewer than 82 games due to a lockout and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morey's suggestion for a 58-game regular season is smart for a few reasons.
First, it balances the schedule across the league. Every team plays every other team two times, once at home, once away.
Second, a 58-game slate would provide players with more rest between games. I'd also open up postseason seeding so that the best two teams could end up in the Finals, even if they play in the same time zone (or even, to the NBA's delight, the same city). And while historically 58 games has proved to be more than enough to determine who should and should not make the postseason, there is one significant problem with this idea: money.
The inconvenient truth is that fewer games means fewer dollars, both in terms of ticket revenue and television rights, and if there's something that players and owners will always agree upon, it will be that fewer dollars sounds like a bad idea. More than anything, the NBA is a business.
Since this league's biggest source of revenue remains tightly bound to the number of broadcasts it can generate, reducing that number is a nonstarter, even though we now know the long-established approach contributes to injuries and diluting the relevance of an average game.
Speaking of the relevance of regular-season games, fans of international soccer love to lecture NBA fans about how relegation is a great way to inject high stakes and suspense into even the worst games on a league schedule.
And you know what? They're right.
If the NBA were building its league structure from scratch right now, it would be better off including some kind of relegation element. (Though including one would not be guaranteed; just look at Major League Soccer, which was created less than 30 years ago, also without any kind of relegation system.)
In a world where the three or four worst regular-season NBA teams would be relegated to the G-League and the three or four best G-League teams would take their places, we would immediately see three huge benefits over the current system.
First of all, tanking would be eradicated immediately, and teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Orlando Magic and Pistons would be sweating bullets right now, trying to win every single game instead of posturing for lottery balls.
Second, instead of tuning out for games following the All-Star break and simply waiting for draft night, their fans would be hyped and desperate. Suddenly, a game like the March 17 Pistons-Magic matchup would become intense.
Third, interest in the G League would explode as fans, coaches and players of teams like the Delaware Blue Coats and Fort Wayne Mad Ants could dream of promotion to the big leagues.
Unfortunately, that's never going to happen, because the 30 NBA franchises are all worth billions, and the current ownership groups in places like Sacramento, Orlando and Detroit aren't interested in morphing into second-division clubs after a rough season.
If the league started today, maybe it could engineer a two-division system that includes relegation, but nobody was thinking like that in 1946.
Along with relegation, another thing the league could borrow from international soccer is the academy system. Right now, the best basketball players in the world arrive to the NBA after enduring one of the most chaotic youth development systems in the sports world.
As it stands, NBA teams can't help players get better until they are deep into their development windows. Too many talents like Zion Williamson or Joel Embiid are shuffled through so many different basketball ecosystems before landing in the league.
At the exact time these young stars need consistent and intentional direction, they get the opposite and move through a dizzying array of AAU, high school and college programs with competing interests and visions for their future.
Imagine a world where NBA teams each had talent academies that blended schooling and athletic development for elite adolescent players. In such a world, players would get exposed to things like professional nutrition, wellness, sports science and practice habits in their teens. Both the clubs and the athletes would be aligned to generate the best long-term versions of these future pros.
The current NBA has no such infrastructure, and its product will be suboptimal until the world's brightest young hoops talent is nurtured in a professional manner.
One more obvious idea from the world of soccer: If the NBA started now, it would include international squads. Thanks to players like Jordan, Nowitzki and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the so-called National Basketball Association is now an international product, but you wouldn't know it by the geographic arrangement of its franchises.
If the league started from scratch today, there would be more games overseas. It might be hard to permanently locate teams in Asia, Africa or Europe, but those fans deserve more opportunities to see these games in person, and the league itself would benefit long term from a bigger international presence.
The fact that the NBA was born in 1946 is both impressive and restrictive. The league's rich traditions and entrenched institutional mindset simultaneously provide it with one of the strongest brand identities in pro sports and prevent it from changing.
But let's face it, the NBA is a boomer, and some of its conventions that date back to the 1940s are beginning to feel like baggage, and they will not help the best basketball league in the world continue to thrive as we race headlong deep into the 21st century.
It's worth asking: What would be different if the league were able to restart from scratch right now?
Given that the league is 75 years old, the lines on the floor, the rulebook, the timing, the court dimensions and the height and size of the hoop are nothing short of a triumph. These core elements are all almost identical to how they've been for decades and have mostly stood the test of time. The original architects of pro basketball mostly nailed it, but there are a few exceptions, both on and off the court. So what would the NBA change if it wasn't tied to the history and tradition of the sport?
On the court
If All-Star Weekend proved anything, it's that the endings of typical NBA games are not as fantastic as they should be.
As it stands, the last few minutes of a 48-minute tilt are often brutal. At the exact moment that excitement should be peaking, games are instead deformed by clock-slowing strategies that end up increasing both free throws and stoppages of play.
Nobody could have foreseen this 75 years ago, but the clock itself incentivizes these ugly tactics. The team that's ahead starts slowing down and milking time, while the trailing team starts fouling and hoisting up wild, rushed 3-pointers (which themselves didn't exist 75 years ago).
When LeBron James ended the All-Star Game with a beautiful fadeaway on Sunday in his hometown, the basketball world once again caught a glimpse of a better future. The Elam Ending, which assigns a target score after a preset amount of timed play, is simply a better approach, but nobody knew that 75 years ago. We know it now.
The league deserves credit for experimenting with these alternative endings during All-Star Weekend, but now that we've seen the positive results, it has to figure out how to get them into real games too, perhaps starting with the in-season tournament NBA commissioner Adam Silver wants to add to the schedule.
For those who argue that the timed game is the only way to do it: Go to any playground or pick-up game around the world and find one that uses a clock.
The NBA would be better off if its games were won by buckets, not by buzzers.
If you think the Elam Ending is too drastic of a change, remember this is the same league that suddenly inserted a field goal worth an extra point to its playing surface in the middle of its history. Big changes are possible.
The 3-point shot was designed to open up the game, and it has definitely worked. Pro basketball is faster and more open than ever, but the pioneers of the arc failed to anticipate the ability of today's shooters.
George Mikan didn't pull up from the logo. Bob Cousy didn't hit 40% of his 24-foot jumpers. Stephen Curry does, and the dimensions of the court -- 94 feet long by 50 feet wide, unchanged from the league's very first game in 1946 -- are one big reason the league can't adjust the 3-point line to challenge today's pros.
The current shape of the arc (which isn't fully an arc) tells you the original architects knew it was weird from the jump.
The "short corner" is currently 22 feet from the center of the rim, and the rest of the arc is 23.75 feet away. That doesn't make sense, but it does ensure shooters still have 3 feet of shooting space in between the 3-point line and the sideline in the corners. The 50-foot length of the baseline was perfect for a league with no 3-point shot, but in 2022, it boxes in the league's ability to extend the 3-point line.
The league's last attempt to "fix" this problem -- by moving the line in to 22 feet all around, making it an actual arc -- encouraged even the most unlikely 3-point shooters to fire away. A similar move now would simply exacerbate the league's transition beyond the arc. Curry, who drained a record 16 3s in Sunday's All-Star Game, has changed the league forever. But he also has shown that the current line placement is too easy for today's best shooters.
The average 2-point jump shot is now worth a measly 0.83 points. Meanwhile, the average corner 3 is now worth 1.13 points. In an era obsessed with data and efficiency, that massive gap is forcing teams to abandon things like elbow jumpers, fadeaways and post play that were once the signature plays of legends like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Dirk Nowitzki.
While the obvious tweak would be to move the line back, that pesky 50-foot baseline has us boxed in. If the league could extend the width of the baselines by just 10 feet, it could reduce the cartoonish efficiency gap between 2-point and 3-point jump shooting, give these incredible athletes more space to fly around and reestablish the majesty of the midrange.
Unfortunately, NBA arenas are already built, season-ticket packages are already in place and even a 10-foot expansion would cost owners a few rows of those tasty lower bowl seats, not to mention cause design headaches for every arena manager in the league too. All because the sport remains played on a court designed more than 75 years ago.
Off the court
Back in the 20th century, the NBA was chasing popularity, and baseball was the national pastime. Many of the NBA's basic structural features were simply lifted from Major League Baseball, including the ideas for divisions and conferences.
While these groupings might have helped organize schedules and bus travel early on, they are now showing their age.
The geographic clustering of the 30 teams affects everything from our Finals matchups to who makes the All-Star Game.
Would Domantas Sabonis be a two-time All-Star if his Indiana Pacers had been a Western Conference team over the past two years? As absurd as that might seem, three of Indiana's divisional rivals -- the Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks -- were once Western Conference teams. The Memphis Grizzlies and New Orleans Pelicans are in the Western Conference despite being far closer to the Atlantic than the Pacific.
If the Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors clearly prove themselves to be the league's two best teams over 82 regular-season games, then why does the league's playoff format prevent them from meeting for the championship in June?
Many passionate NBA fans can't even name the league's six divisions, let alone which teams belong in each. Regardless, these old groupings still influence scheduling, which in turn affects things like playoff seeding and draft positioning.
Because the league's schedule is tied to its division and conference structure, it's hard to simply say those structures should be eliminated, but there's a fix for that too. Just last week, Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey suggested the league would be better off with a shorter regular season. The current 82-game schedule doesn't quite have 75 years of history attached to it (teams only played 60 games in 1946-47, and the schedule didn't expand to 82 until the late 1960s), and the idea of reducing the schedule has been floated regularly in recent years, particularly after three seasons (2011-12, 2019-20 and 2020-21) saw teams play fewer than 82 games due to a lockout and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morey's suggestion for a 58-game regular season is smart for a few reasons.
First, it balances the schedule across the league. Every team plays every other team two times, once at home, once away.
Second, a 58-game slate would provide players with more rest between games. I'd also open up postseason seeding so that the best two teams could end up in the Finals, even if they play in the same time zone (or even, to the NBA's delight, the same city). And while historically 58 games has proved to be more than enough to determine who should and should not make the postseason, there is one significant problem with this idea: money.
The inconvenient truth is that fewer games means fewer dollars, both in terms of ticket revenue and television rights, and if there's something that players and owners will always agree upon, it will be that fewer dollars sounds like a bad idea. More than anything, the NBA is a business.
Since this league's biggest source of revenue remains tightly bound to the number of broadcasts it can generate, reducing that number is a nonstarter, even though we now know the long-established approach contributes to injuries and diluting the relevance of an average game.
Speaking of the relevance of regular-season games, fans of international soccer love to lecture NBA fans about how relegation is a great way to inject high stakes and suspense into even the worst games on a league schedule.
And you know what? They're right.
If the NBA were building its league structure from scratch right now, it would be better off including some kind of relegation element. (Though including one would not be guaranteed; just look at Major League Soccer, which was created less than 30 years ago, also without any kind of relegation system.)
In a world where the three or four worst regular-season NBA teams would be relegated to the G-League and the three or four best G-League teams would take their places, we would immediately see three huge benefits over the current system.
First of all, tanking would be eradicated immediately, and teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Orlando Magic and Pistons would be sweating bullets right now, trying to win every single game instead of posturing for lottery balls.
Second, instead of tuning out for games following the All-Star break and simply waiting for draft night, their fans would be hyped and desperate. Suddenly, a game like the March 17 Pistons-Magic matchup would become intense.
Third, interest in the G League would explode as fans, coaches and players of teams like the Delaware Blue Coats and Fort Wayne Mad Ants could dream of promotion to the big leagues.
Unfortunately, that's never going to happen, because the 30 NBA franchises are all worth billions, and the current ownership groups in places like Sacramento, Orlando and Detroit aren't interested in morphing into second-division clubs after a rough season.
If the league started today, maybe it could engineer a two-division system that includes relegation, but nobody was thinking like that in 1946.
Along with relegation, another thing the league could borrow from international soccer is the academy system. Right now, the best basketball players in the world arrive to the NBA after enduring one of the most chaotic youth development systems in the sports world.
As it stands, NBA teams can't help players get better until they are deep into their development windows. Too many talents like Zion Williamson or Joel Embiid are shuffled through so many different basketball ecosystems before landing in the league.
At the exact time these young stars need consistent and intentional direction, they get the opposite and move through a dizzying array of AAU, high school and college programs with competing interests and visions for their future.
Imagine a world where NBA teams each had talent academies that blended schooling and athletic development for elite adolescent players. In such a world, players would get exposed to things like professional nutrition, wellness, sports science and practice habits in their teens. Both the clubs and the athletes would be aligned to generate the best long-term versions of these future pros.
The current NBA has no such infrastructure, and its product will be suboptimal until the world's brightest young hoops talent is nurtured in a professional manner.
One more obvious idea from the world of soccer: If the NBA started now, it would include international squads. Thanks to players like Jordan, Nowitzki and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the so-called National Basketball Association is now an international product, but you wouldn't know it by the geographic arrangement of its franchises.
If the league started from scratch today, there would be more games overseas. It might be hard to permanently locate teams in Asia, Africa or Europe, but those fans deserve more opportunities to see these games in person, and the league itself would benefit long term from a bigger international presence.
The fact that the NBA was born in 1946 is both impressive and restrictive. The league's rich traditions and entrenched institutional mindset simultaneously provide it with one of the strongest brand identities in pro sports and prevent it from changing.
- 11,403
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Elam ending is cool for an all star game... You're taking away OT and all types of clutch moments if you decide to do that though.
- 11,403
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Also relegation would not work. Teams have fanbases... you think people are gonna tune in to watch the Nets smack the Sioux Falls Skyforce? 
- 40,260
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Wonderful
Oram: As tensions rise between LeBron James and Rob Pelinka, where will Lakers draw the line?
By Bill Oram 2h ago
104
LeBron James and the Lakers are heading for a divorce.
Or, like with so many other relationships that have teetered on the brink of a break-up, they will find a way to reconcile.
Whichever way this goes, the events of the past week have proven something that has often been overlooked in the first four years of LeBron’s Lakers tenure: The gift of his presence is not without an expiration date. This was always made abundantly clear to his past employers. When he signed a four-year contract with the Lakers in 2018, James bucked his tradition of signing one-year deals in Cleveland, repeatedly leveraging his own looming free agency to keep the pressure on Cavaliers brass. There has never been that kind of urgency with the Lakers.
Maybe it was the fact that he already owned two mansions in L.A. Or the fact his production company was in the process of becoming a major player in Hollywood. Or that no one knew he would be playing at a league-altering level at age 37.
Whatever the reason, the Lakers appear to have taken for granted that whenever James decided to sail off into the sunset, he would take Sunset Boulevard to get there.
And as a likely result of that, there have been far more wasted years, including this 27-31 season, than there ever were in Cleveland and Miami.
That illusion of permanence has now been shattered, thanks not only to a series of passive-aggressive missives from James that make it clear he was frustrated by the Lakers inaction at the trade deadline, but also, in a conversation with The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd, entertaining the prospect of returning to Cleveland and explicitly stating his final year will be spent playing alongside his son — wherever that may be.
This has to all come as a shock to the Lakers and especially their vice president of basketball operations, Rob Pelinka, who has repeatedly yielded to James and the appropriately-named Klutch Sports Group that represents him.
Why appropriate?
Because James and agent Rich Paul long grabbed hold of the Lakers organization and are now beginning to really squeeze.
The situation is tense enough that one source close to the Lakers likened it to the early days of a war.
So far, the Lakers haven’t shown a particular willingness to engage in battle with their superstar, with sources saying that Pelinka has insisted internally that there are no hard feelings between the two sides.
But even if it is for now a one-sided war, by digging their heels in and not giving James everything that he wants has the potential to be received as a form of aggression — a battle tactic in its own right.
Pelinka erred when he said there was “alignment” between the front office and the Lakers superstars after the team failed to make a trade at the deadline. There quite clearly was not.
It remains murky, however, what exactly Pelinka was supposed to do at the deadline, and to what end.
If the Lakers traded their one available first rounder, a 2027 pick, and it didn’t make them a contender — which by now feels completely out of reach — it would have only limited their ability to improve the team in the offseason.
It’s obvious that James wanted him to do something. But Pelinka no doubt remembered that the last time he yielded to James’ management instincts, he got saddled with Russell Westbrook.
It is notable that maybe for the first time in James’ tenure, he did not get what he wanted out of Pelinka.
And now there is a divide between two of the key pillars in the unorthodox power structure of the Lakers that includes Jeanie Buss, Pelinka, James and Klutch, and much of the Rambis family tree.
As is true for the dynamic between any NBA star and his team, what’s best for James is not always what’s best for the Lakers. Pelinka shoulders at least some responsibility for the long-term health of the organization
That is of course not of as much interest to James as he chases a fifth title and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record.
And it only makes sense that he would focus his frustration on Pelinka’s inactivity at the trade deadline, because if he were to peel back any additional layers of the team’s roster, he would see his fingerprints all over it, too.
It’s impossible to know where all of this leads. James has the leverage to force a trade out of Los Angeles this summer, if that’s something he is interested in. He clearly has no great loyalty to Pelinka, the man who pushed the Lakers chips in to acquire James’ chosen co-star, Anthony Davis.
Why should he, considering the roster construction in each of James’ other three seasons in L.A?
And if James is done with Pelinka but not ready to be done with L.A. then doesn’t Jeanie Buss have to at least consider making a change at the top of her family’s business?
If James feels like the Lakers are not doing everything to maximize his golden years and he sees that as them pushing him away then, well, he might as well already be gone.
That heat you’re feeling is coming from the flamethrower James is pointing at Pelinka.
There is a certain irony that it is Pelinka who is now being pushed around by a Lakers superstar and his powerful agent. For nearly two decades, Pelinka was that agent, pressuring the Lakers in his own way on behalf of Kobe Bryant.
The Lakers are a superstar-driven franchise, a fact Pelinka embodies perhaps to a fault.
The philosophy can essentially be traced back to the beginning of basketball time, but for the sake of keeping it in the color TV era let’s just go back to 1991 when Magic Johnson’s career was cut short after he was diagnosed with HIV.
Jeanie Buss was as close to Johnson as anybody. She considered him another brother. But she also knew what he had meant for the Lakers, and what it meant for the Lakers to lose him.
When I recently spoke to Buss for a story on Johnson, she really emphasized how important it is that the Lakers not only have stars, but that the franchise takes care of them.
“I made my prayers at night and said, ‘If you ever send us another player like Magic Johnson,’” she said, “I will never take that player for granted again, and what that means to our city.”
That next player was Kobe Bryant. With him soon came a young agent named Rob Pelinka.
But for as important as Bryant was to the Lakers, sources inside the organization have long said that not even the legendary Black Mamba wielded as much power within the organization as James now has.
Bryant was never able to strong-arm the Lakers to make a move like the one James helped orchestrate for Westbrook, which has proven to be an outright disaster.
The Lakers did trade Shaquille O’Neal to placate Kobe before he hit free agency in 2004, but when he was under contract like James is now they did not always give in to his demands.
They didn’t give in to his trade demand in 2007. They brought back Phil Jackson even though his relationship with Bryant was strained. They avoided making a panicked move to marginally improve a lackluster roster and instead waited for Pau Gasol to become available.
The Lakers rewarded Bryant’s trust and as a result, they earned his loyalty. When he was still rehabbing from a devastating Achilles injury in 2013, the Lakers heaped upon Bryant a two-year, $49.5 million extension that essentially amounted to a lifetime achievement bonus. Bryant was so fervently embraced by the organization that when they overhauled the front office it was his agent Pelinka who was tabbed to be the new GM.
That is the way Pelinka was schooled in the Lakers way of doing business.
But now that he is on the other side of the table, Pelinka might be discovering that James and Paul work from a different playbook.
The relationship between LeBron and the Lakers now feels far more transactional than it ever did before.
This is a franchise that has long prided itself on keeping its stars happy. Now, the biggest of them all is, quite apparently, rather unhappy.
Here is the only question left to ask: In 2022, where is the line of what the Lakers are willing to do for a star?
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Read the article. Just trade him in the offseason. I'm sick of this nonsense....
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Thanks for posting, but this stuff is really getting nonsensical at this point.
"The situation is tense enough that one source close to the Lakers likened it to the early days of a war."
Seriously....well how? If it that was true there's not a single mention of how that would be the case in the article.
This clickbait crap has to stop LOL
"The situation is tense enough that one source close to the Lakers likened it to the early days of a war."
Seriously....well how? If it that was true there's not a single mention of how that would be the case in the article.
This clickbait crap has to stop LOL
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Every idea they posed followed with “it’ll never happen because owners would lose money”.
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Meh, find it hard to believe LeBron is leaving LA in the next year.
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Doesn’t Lebron have a no trade clause?
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No. But superstars tend to have a say in going or in this case, staying.
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Author acknowledges how difficult it would be and thus unlikely.Also relegation would not work. Teams have fanbases... you think people are gonna tune in to watch the Nets smack the Sioux Falls Skyforce?
The 58 games, playing each team twice is most readable but even then almost impossible bc of money.
Sure nba is popular but check the top 100 prime time ratings last year. Nba couldn’t even beat a regular season nfl game to make the list lol.
