Although there is already news that head coach Frank Vogel will be sacked after the end of the season, and that home star LeBron James will miss the remaining three games, there is no exact word about how the 2021-22 Los Angeles Lakers season will end, the only thing we can be sure of is that the Lakers have decided not to play in the playoffs, and at the beginning of the season, no one could have predicted such an ending.
On Wednesday, when the San Antonio Spurs beat the Denver Nuggets, the Lakers' hopes of impacting the playoffs this season dropped to zero, followed by Vogel, James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook, all of whom appeared in the news, arguing that one or all of them needed to take responsibility for the Lakers' dismal performance this season.
But understand that people certainly know that the Lakers' problems are not the only ones, it is not fair to put all the responsibility on the coach or a player, the Lakers' top priority is that general manager Rob Pelinka needs to figure out how to get the Lakers back on track next season.
Ironically, because the Lakers' salary space structure is extremely unbalanced, Westbrook's execution of player options is basically a certain thing, so the answer may start small. Last season's Lakers managed to find some cheap old future to strengthen the roster outside the team's core players, but next season only Thick Brow, James, Tarren Horton Tucker and Austin Reeves have contracts, and the Lakers have Stanley Johnson's team options, while Westbrook and Kendrick Nunn have player options.
Once Westbrook decides to execute on his player options, the Lakers will spend $148 million a year on James, Brow and Westbrook alone next season, effectively exceeding the $26 million salary cap. In other words, the Lakers can't create enough salary space and have no way to make a big deal through the free agent market, in addition to finding a way to trade one player from Westbrook, James, or Davis, without getting back an overpriced player. Of course, the Lakers can still focus on those low-paid veterans in the way of last season, but considering the team's performance this season, those veterans who can really bring changes to the Lakers are absolutely unwilling to join the Lakers, who have a very small possibility of winning the championship.
What's more, the Lakers have not been able to strengthen through the draft, they do not have any draft picks in this year's draft, their first-round pick has been sent to the New Orleans Pelicans in the thick eyebrow deal, and their second-round draft picks have long been returned to the Spurs. So the question is, how can a team that has no salary space and no draft picks improve? I think we have to start small, and the real examples are the Brooklyn Nets and the Miami Heat.
As a historically well-known goal-picking team, the Heat have never been as deeply involved in the salary cap territory as the Lakers, mainly because the team leader Pat Riley has always focused on scouting and player development, as have most successful small-market teams. Players like James and Davis may be the basis for the Lakers to win the championship, but I believe that without players like Alex Caruso, Kyle Kuzma and Caldwell Pope, the Lakers would not have been able to win the championship in 2020. Those playoff-level teams, even championship teams, will always do the following two things. 1 Discover little-known but valuable role players; 2 Maximize the talents of these role players so that teams can use these non-star players to create low-cost, influential rotations.
This season's Miami Heat is such a team building model, the team's three main rotational role players Taylor Hiro, Max Strauss and Ermel Jurt Cevenn have a total annual salary of only $7 million, which is even less than the Lakers Tucker's annual salary of $3 million, of which Strauss and Jurt Ceven are completely unknown players, but without them, the Heat will never lock the throne of the first place in the East. The Heat, in particular, accomplished this feat despite the team's serious injury.
Sean Max and the Brooklyn Nets he runs are another team that Lakers vice president of operations Rob Pelinka should learn from this summer. When Max took over the Nets in 2016, the team was in a very bad situation, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry all left the team, and the draft picks that eventually became Jaylen Brown, Jason Tatum and Colin Sexton had already been sent to other teams, and the Nets at that time had no salary flexibility and no future to speak of. But even without a high-pick pick, the Nets sent a luxurious lineup of executives and experts to Chicago in 2016 to watch the year's rookie joint auditions, and their task at the time was to do as much reconnaissance as possible to find players who could help.
Max eventually got Karis LeVert and Isaiah Whitehead in that year's draft draft, and over the next six months, he signed Joe Harris (who had previously been abandoned by the Orlando Magic and signed a two-year, $2.03 million contract with the Nets as a free agent) and Spencer Dinwiddie (who was cut by the Chicago Bulls in October of that year, and the Nets signed him to a three-year, $2.9 million contract). A season later, Max signed Jarrett Allen and got D'Angelo Russell in a trade with the Lakers, which was basically the core of the Nets getting back on track and eventually signing Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. While it all takes time to materialize, and time happens to be James' worst enemy, the point is that no matter how dire the situation, history has proven that a brilliant team management can build a competitive team without ready-made valuable assets.
In this league, there are usually two types of teams: one that relies on free agents and trades to build a championship-winning lineup, and the other that chooses a more gentle and slow way to build their own lineups, usually through drafts, with big market teams often the former, while small market teams usually go the other way. Editor believes that if Marx or Riley were to take the helm of the Lakers, they might immediately choose to trade Horton Tucker in exchange for draft picks, and they would frantically call the management of the Pelicans, Blazers, Thunder, Rockets, Pacers and Grizzlies, who all have multiple first-round draft picks in their hands, and then find a young player and at least one more promising player from the summer league, and only after these things are done, they will call Tristan Thompson. Phone calls from veterans Such as Semi-Ogerle and Victor Oladipo.
By the end of the 2022-23 season, the Lakers may choose to form, and there may be some players on the team that we have never heard of, but as we have seen before, it is often the names that we don't know that end up making the biggest difference, and who can guarantee that there will not be a second Caruso? At that time, DeMar DeRozan, Buddy Hield and Kyle Lowry will become free agents, and they may help the Lakers out of their current predicament.
The Lakers ended the season earlier than anyone imagined, they will have a lot of problems to solve in the long summer, because there are almost no choices, the Lakers can only start from small things bit by bit, hugging wood, born at the end of the millimeter; The Ninth Floor Platform, from the ground up, Pelinka and James must put down their bodies to save themselves.