After a disappointing playoff exit the year before, the Los Angeles Lakers, who entered the new season, regrouped their resolve: They would follow the team's legendary leader to win before he began to slide. And this time, the players around him are not only old teammates who have stayed in the championship lineup, but also new big-name players — although the peak of these players may have passed, but they can still help the Lakers regain their greatness. However, despite all the expectations, the team looks like it's at best the middle of the league. When the entire season is over 3/4, their winning percentage is still below 50%. For the Lakers, such a season is simply a disaster.
What do you think I'm talking about this Lakers team right now? Sorry, I'm just looking back at the 2012-13 Lakers.
It's unbelievable: There are so many similarities between these two "super teams" that can be called the most disappointing in Lakers history.
The Lakers in 2013 eventually banded together and made the playoffs for some time to come, but were soon out, and the Lakers didn't make the playoffs in six consecutive years since. The good news for the Lakers this season is that they still have time to overcome the problems, and the bad news is that the Lakers may be in greater trouble than the star-studded Lakers team a decade ago.
In both seasons, the Lakers made a readjustment shortly after winning the championship but falling off the altar.
In 2009 and 2010, the Lakers, which own Kobe Bryant, Paul Gasol, Lamar Odom and Derrick Fisher, won the championship for the second consecutive year. But the core of the four-man roster is also aging — they were all over 30 in the 2011 playoffs. As a result, they did not play well in the second round of the playoffs, and were eventually swept out by the champion Lone Ranger that year, which also marked the complete end of the coaching career of legendary coach Phil Jackson. After a failed deal with star guard Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets in the offseason, the Lakers, led by new coach Mike Brown, continued to show downward momentum in the 2011-12 season. In the end, they stopped in the second round again, and were easily defeated by the newly rising Oklahoma Thunder.
It's clear that for the team in the league that prides itself on its identity, change is necessary. Later that summer, change did come. The Lakers first brought future Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash from the Phoenix Suns to Los Angeles through a first-and-last trade deal, and then recruited veteran NBA Best Team Center Dwight Howard with a four-way deal that shook the league and involved 12 players. With the addition of Howard and Nash, plus the original Kobe, Gasol and Meta-Woldpis, the Lakers' starting five are all current or former All-Star players, and the Lakers' momentum seems to have caught up with several of the super teams that eventually won the championship that year (Boston Celtics in 2008 and Miami Heat in 2012).
Shortly after Howard's deal was completed, the Lakers, along with defending champion heat, became the biggest favorite team for the 2013 NBA championship. But it soon became apparent that expectations were too high: The Lakers went 0-8 in preseason, then suffered another three-game losing streak in the opening stages of the regular season, losing four of their first five games (losing at least 8 points each), after which Brown was sacked. After a few games, Mike D'Antoni took over as head coach, and although the Lakers were on track for a while, raising their winning percentage to more than 50% at the end of November, their record became 15-15 by the end of the new year, and by the end of January, their record had fallen to 20-26, four wins away from the last playoff spot in the West.
Since then, the Lakers' performance has begun to improve (with a 25-11 record in the final stages of the regular season) and enter the playoffs as seventh in the West. But Bryant had a ruptured Achilles tendon and missed the playoffs with two games left in the regular season, and the powerful San Antonio Spurs awaited them in the first round. As a result, the Lakers hastily ended this once promising season with little resistance. The Spurs swept through the promotion 4-0, averaging nearly 19 points per game over the Lakers.
Why did the Lakers' super team fail that year? In fact, as one would expect from the league's oldest team with the oldest average age, injuries became the main reason for their defeat, with Gasol missing 33 games, Nash missing 32, and Howard and Ci Shiping also missing for a while — and in retrospect, Bryant missed the last playoff trip of his career. The "All-Star Starting Five" that was blown up to the limit has only seven games in a year to play in full force. Second, the Lakers' defense has been a huge stumbling block for them throughout the season, and despite bringing in Howard, who has just won three consecutive DPOYs, their defensive efficiency has fallen from 13th in the league in 2011-12 to 20th in the league in 2012-13. In addition, the talents of the Lakers superstars have not been fully realized. Although Bryant played the best regular season RAPTOR plus-minus since the 2009-10 season, howard, Nash and Gasol all saw the same stats slip, and all fell by more than 3 quantitative values from their previous stats.
It's hard to say how the Lakers would have performed if the 2012-13 season had stayed healthy (or whether the lineup would have been able to remain completely healthy given their staffing), but they may have been doomed from the start. The same applies to the Lakers in 2021-22, a Team that shares many of the same shortcomings as their predecessors and is even worse in some ways.
The failed Lakers super team looks worse than the last one.
Like the team in 2012-13, this year's Lakers, although one of the favorites to win the championship at preseason odds, did not win a game in preseason (0-6). In the first 61 games of the regular season, their winning percentage (27-34) and average winning percentage (-2.0 points) were worse than their predecessors (30-31, +0.9 points). The Lakers' current Elo rating is more than 100 (1428 vs. 1537) from the same period in the 2012-13 season. It is worth mentioning that the current Lakers are also the oldest team in the NBA, with an average age (30.6 years old) almost the same as the Lakers (30.7 years old) in the 2012-13 season.
For this year's Lakers, they have slipped on both the offensive and defensive ends. The Lakers are only ranked 25th in the league in offensive efficiency this year, a problem worse than last season (24th at the time). In the eyes of the outside world, the healthier LeBron James and Anthony Davis (if both are in good shape, they are arguably the best duo of all time) and players such as Russell Westbrook and Carmelo Anthony, who joined in the offseason, should have at least played an offensive firepower above the league average (similar to the Lakers when they won the championship in 2020). But that hasn't happened so far: James and Davis have missed a lot of big games, and Westbrook is now one of the least offensively efficient players in the league (plus, he's not the only player on the Lakers with the league's bottom-level offensive efficiency).
Meanwhile, the Lakers' defense is barely better than average, a far cry from the league's first-ever regular-season defensive efficiency a year ago. In this way, it is not difficult to see why the Lakers have fallen to the bottom.
As for the competition for playoff spots, this Lakers team may be more disappointing than the Lakers in 2012-13, according to our model predictions, the Lakers already have only an 8% chance of getting a ticket to the playoffs — of course, the Lakers are certainly more likely to enter the playoffs for two consecutive years, but from their current position in the ninth place in the West, they need to win two consecutive games to enter the playoffs. And once you lose one game, you're out (that's why sportsbook sets the odds on the Lakers not making the playoffs at -186, or the 65 percent chance of adjusting before that). Even if the current Lakers can beat a 71.4 percent win rate for the rest of the season, matching the Lakers' win rate over the same period in the 2012-13 season, they can only end the season with a disappointing record (42 wins and 40 losses), and our model believes that such a record can only get tied for eighth place in the West at most, and then enter the playoffs.
The above is only the best case scenario. In reality, the team is faltering, and they may not even be able to do the same strong end-of-season sprints as they did nine years ago. The Lakers have lost six of their last seven games, haven't won a back-to-back game since Jan. 7, and recently had their Elo ratings at their lowest point in the entire season. Davis will still be absent for at least a few weeks, and after his downfall, except for the game that beat the Trail Blazers on Feb. 2, James already has to play at a superhuman level to have a chance to lead the Lakers to victory. To borrow a phrase from Rick Pitino, even if James still has the elderly and injury-prone Gasol and Nash around him, the situation may not be so bad (by the way, Howard is still with James - but he is now 36 years old and averaging only 5.3 points per game).
Like the Lakers in the 2012-13 season, the Lakers' theoretical basis for forming a super team this season is that "even the power of the stars alone is enough to pry open the championship window" and allow them to participate in a deeper level of competition once again, but the results are far from the theory. In contrast, history seems to be repeating itself, and the Lakers, led by James, Davis and Westbrook, have had a hard time avoiding this.