NBA 2018-19: 4 Burning questions from the first week of the new season
Don’t you like the smell of it? The new basketball season is underway and there is so much us hoops fans have to be excited about.
Superstars have changed teams such as LeBron James (he is a Laker now if you live under a rock). Kawhi Leonard and DeMar DeRozan swapped franchises and we can say that Boston got a new player in Gordon Hayward as he did not play in all but five minutes of the previous season.
This season also brings new challenges with ‘pre-agency’ (term coined by Bill Simmons of The Ringer fame) as players have started taking more advantage of the impending free agency by refusing to re-sign with their current team, a prime example of this would be the Kawhi Leonard.
The 2019 free agent class is also really promising, which would mean that various teams would be trying to create as much cap space as they can in order to land the big fish. Therefore, this was always going to be a very interesting season, now let’s see how the first week fared.
#1 LeBron’s Laker Journey: ‘Trainwreck’ of a start?
The Lakers started the season with a 0-3 start, dropping their season opener against Portland, then falling to the Rockets in LeBron’s home debut, and losing to San Antonio in dramatic fashion, through some missed free-throws by LeBron near the end of the game.
Although, there is light at the end of the tunnel for Laker fans, as most of the LeBron’s teams take some time to get going and both LeBron and their coach Luke Walton said that it would take some time for them to get their feet wet.
There is one thing though, this young core of the Lakers team is going to run and James is all for that (for now). The pace can be seen in the transition play of this team, where they are averaging 32.3 points per game, which ranks at the top of the league. This, by no means, signals the return of Showtime but it is a step in the right direction.
Their defense has been in shambles and there is little to no shooting on this team. But Los Angeles Lakers basketball is relevant again and I’m sure we’ll be talking about the Lakers a whole lot this season.