Lakers Shot for the Stars and Landed in a Black Hole

The Lakers Shot for the Stars and Landed in a Black Hole https://t.co/afb16plt2t via @ringer

— LakerTom (@LakerTom) June 17, 2024

After losing out on Dan Hurley, Los Angeles reportedly interviewed JJ Redick for the head-coaching gig this weekend. But hiring the podcaster won’t distract from the fact that the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore.

It is not the end times in La La Land, but things appear to stand one Celtics win and a dusting of brimstone away from it. Bitter rivals are frolicking in the front yards of many Lakers faithfuls’ mental abodes. Dan Hurley just dropped a master set of keys to the club like they were molten. Management is on the case, though it may, in fact, also be the perp it’s looking for. Rinse, repeat, insert a generic Magic Johnson tweet, and you’ve got another batch of late-stage Lakers doom. This fan, for one, kindly requests that somebody, anybody—though my preference is the nepo heiress responsible for as many losing seasons in a decade as in the preceding four combined—please, just make it all stop.

A partial list of Laker self-owns in the past six weeks, all of which manage to tread the line between biblical, bewildering, and buffoonish:

-That time when the squad was punked, at an average of five and a half points in five games, by the same studio gangstas that punked them, at an average of six points in four, the year before.

-That time when an unnamed source said the Lakers are viewing a ringless former role player and current podcaster with no coaching experience as comparable to Patrick fucking Riley.

-That other time when everyone in the sport watched Laker management spit game at the best coach in college basketball, only for that coach to ostensibly choose living in Glastonbury, Connecticut (we’ll return to this later), for $20 million less than what they could’ve given him.

-That time when the franchise still didn’t have a head coach 45 days after firing their previous one and reporters started hypothesizing that they didn’t really have a plan B beyond Hurley.

In the natural world there’d be buzzards circling overhead. Today, we’ve got r/NBA, FS1’s morning lineup, and a couple of my shamrock-bleeding coworkers. There is a part of this fandom-spanning reaction that is understandable Laker schadenfreude. There are as many people with reasons to assume the worst about this team as there are those beguiled into assuming something close to the best. (Dream robbing and star chasing to the tune of 32 Finals appearances and 17 championships will do that.) Another part of this, though, is simply uncut gospel truth: Something is broken in the functioning of these recent Lakers, something that their two marquee stars have covered up, in more ways and on more occasions than we are probably capable of perceiving.

The question—of the moment and of the Lakers’ long-term future—is does perception match reality? Is this really as bad as it seems? And the answer, which exists in whispers in El Segundo and that arena that nobody calls “Crypto,” goes something like Mind the cliff, the drop is steeper than it appears. There’s a thin line between has-been and can’t-be. Lineage cushions the fall only so much. Staying on top of this version, of this league, is as much a matter of movement as it is a matter of obstinance. For the Lakers, it’s not that the old ways don’t work, it’s that they no longer suffice.