Wake me up in July 2014: A Laker fan’s call to ease the pain
Head coach Mike D’Antoni of the Los Angeles Lakers with Kobe Bryant #24 and Pau Gasol #16. The trio have never seemed to get along well. (Getty Images)
With just over a week since free agency officially began, the Los Angeles Lakers are poised to enter the 2013-2014 NBA season at the exact opposite spectrum of the championship or bust expectations from last year’s failed experiment.
With the NBA and the luxury tax restricting the team from making pricey acquisitions, as well as the possibilities of both the promising 2014 free agency and draft clearly swaying the team’s decisions, whatever moves the Lakers remain to make cannot keep them from being expected to finish worse than this past season’s team that made the playoffs on the last game of the season.
ESPN analyst Bill Simmons recently penned a piece for Grantland detailing a series of moves that would position the Lakers best for a big 2014 offseason, albeit while ultimately mailing next season in.
Kobe Bryant, for his part, sneered at the suggestion of sacrificing next season to be able to swoop in on next year’s franchise altering free agents. He’s also been quoted saying that, in spite of being 35-years-old (a month away from 36 when his contract expires), he looks to get paid as much as possible.
It’s already primed to be an ugly 2013-2014 season in Laker Land, and the above mentioned factors make the off-season after that, even trickier.
The Lakers have always been a recruiting force, be it via making big trades or through free agent signings. But while they’re still based in Los Angeles, and offer players a celebrity friendly lifestyle few other cities can match, at least from an outsider’s perspective, the change at the top of the organisation appears to make it more challenging to keep making the right moves as they have so seamlessly done in the past.
Perhaps this second-guessing of Jim Buss all began with Mike D’Antoni. Nobody complained about Buss (already overseeing the team, as his father was rendered to limited capacity by his health) when the Lakers signed Steve Nash and Dwight Howard. But when the Lakers chose D’Antoni over Phil Jackson and continued to play like an incredibly dysfunctional group that made die-hard Laker fans cringe at their play, the collective public finger pointed at the direction of Buss and his coaching hire.
Maybe sticking with D’Antoni is just part of the 2014 plan. A big part of getting rid of Mike Brown just five games into the season was because it became obvious that the players had began to tune him out. But if this team is indeed positioning itself behind the scenes to be a lottery team, to not only be primed for big free agent grabs, but also an important player in a top-heavy, yet deep rookie draft, D’Antoni might just be their guy.
We know he can’t coach a team with two bigs playing heavy minutes, yet the Lakers now have Chris Kaman. Pau Gasol has been publicly critical of his coach. And Kobe has not shied away from subtle, yet continual digs at D’Antoni. Outside of Nash, it seems the two most important players already have a formed opinion of the man supposedly calling the shots from the bench.
The Lakers management looks to also have a sound plan to ease the fans’ pain of watching next season’s team. A familiar face and Los Angeles favourite Jordan Farmar will be back, while other players from the last championship team (Lamar Odom and Sasha Vujacic) are also rumoured to return.
If you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot, might as well have a touch of nostalgia to try and appease the masses. That just might make it more tolerable. And it’s a plan that doesn’t sound half bad.
A lot of Laker fans never really wanted the franchise to lock up 118 million and five years to someone who they saw firsthand wasn’t quite cut out for the glaring Los Angeles gaze, and sky high expectations. Now, they’ll have to live with the team they have left. A bunch of expiring deals, one-year contracts, and an aging megastar coming off one of the worst injuries an older player can have.
But history suggests that they will figure something out. As highlighted by Simmons, since moving to Southern California, the Lakers have won over 63 percent of all their games, been in 25 Finals, missed the playoffs just four times, and never won fewer than 30 games. They also haven’t picked higher than 10th with their own pick since 1975.
This is a franchise that’s rarely been mediocre. And in the few occasions when they’ve been, it’s never been for long. The Lakers will be a prominent player in the 2014 sweepstakes, unfortunately for their fans, they’ll have to wait a full season to see that promise realised.