Why the Lakers Were Always Bound to Struggle

Despite being many people’s premier candidate to win a championship, the Los Angeles Lakers still exhibit serious signs of struggle in the 2021-2022 NBA season. Almost one third of the way through, the Lakers boast a record of 13-12, which is astonishingly mediocre for a team that was supposedly a championship contender. To the contrary of what some of my friends have repeatedly assured me over the past six weeks, it has become apparent that the Lakers’ chemistry issues are far too fundamentally flawed to simply just be “fixed with time.” Even with having three all-star caliber players, this Lakers ‘superteam’ was always bound to disappoint, as while they have a lot of talent, they’re composed of players with many different clashing playstyles; this  historically has not, and will never work for teams trying to find legitimate success in the league. 

In spite of the fact that people tend to view constructing basketball ‘superteams’ as a means of easily winning a championship, history has shown that it requires more than just a bunch of all-stars and talent for a team to find success in the NBA. Basketball is a team game, and individual players have to be willing to sacrifice some of their glory in order for their teams as a collective to win games. For example, from 2017 to 2019, the Golden State Warriors dominated the NBA, winning two out of the three NBA Finals that they participated in when they had their core of Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Stephen Curry, and Draymond Green together. Even though people like to discredit this team’s accomplishments due to the sheer amount of talent that they had in comparison to the rest of the league, what people fail to realize is just how much the four all-stars on this team had to sacrifice in terms of their roles. Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, two former NBA MVPs respectively, both sacrificed substantially decreased roles so they could achieve collective success. They were able to let go of their egos so they could learn how they could best play together. This also could be considered true for the 2011 Miami Heat, another team with some of the most sheer talent in the league at the time. Despite the fact that the Heat had three of the best players in the league at the time, they still struggled to a 9-9 start to the season. It was only when Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh settled for slightly decreased roles that the Miami Heat began to lay the foundation for an almost five year NBA dynasty.

Unfortunately, the two examples that I shared tend to be exceptions for ‘superteams,’ not the rule. More often than not, great talent is accompanied by large egos, and having egos clash in a team sport is a recipe for disaster. The 2004 and 2013 Lakers were teams that were filled to the brim with talent; at the start of their respective seasons, they were both considered to be some of the favorites to win a championship. However, despite having everything going for them on paper, the seasons for these two Laker teams were disastrous, as they were mired by a plethora of drama and rumors. Many of the great players on these teams were aging, and they were unable to alter the ways in which they played the game, and were resistant to taking decreased roles. As a result, both these teams were broken up entirely just a year after they started playing together.

While it could be too early to tell for sure, the Lakers as of now seem to be following more in the footsteps of the old Laker teams than the Heat or the Warriors. When you have a bunch of aging, stubborn, egoistic, historically ball-dominant players on one team such as Russell Westbrook, Lebron James, and Anthony Davis, it’s going to be near impossible to develop solid chemistry with each other without some degree of sacrifice. So far, the Lakers have made little-to-no progress or promise in this area 25 games this season, and are looking to be second-round exits at best. Barring them making some massive adjustments, the Lakers are looking to serve as another cautionary tale that simply gathering a lot of talent on a team doesn’t always translate to an easy route to success.