The Lakers have Luka Doncic and LeBron James, two of the biggest names in the NBA. They’re the most famous and most talked-about team in the league, and even after last night’s loss, they’re 34-22 and in fifth place in the West, which is still a prime position to make some postseason noise.
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Despite all that, nobody seems to be taking the Lakers seriously as a title-contending team. The way they played against the Celtics last night was a prime example of why. They were home and finally came into the game at full strength, and yet not only did they lose to a team that’s been without Jayson Tatum all year, but they lost handily by 22 points.
James Worthy and many other Lakers greats were on hand to honor Pat Riley as his statue outside the stadium was unveiled, and to say that Big Game James wasn’t impressed with the game he witnessed would be a major understatement.
“You show no respect for the uniform,” Worthy said of L.A.’s performance.
Worthy is far from the only one who’s down on the Lakers. On today’s episode of The Hoop Collective, Tim MacMahon gave a crystal clear reason why the Lakers rank below every other team that’s supposedly contending for a title.
“They’re in the red again on that point differential, Windy, -0.3,” he told his cohost Brian Windhorst. “They are the one team in the league that has a winning record and a negative point differential. It’s funny, they’re 12 games above .500 with a negative point differential. That’s hard to do.”
When Windhorst offered the argument that Luka Doncic has made the Lakers one of the best clutch teams in the league, MacMahon agreed, but he also said that there’s been some luck to those wins. He then pointed out that of the 22 losses the Lakers have suffered this year, 19 of them have come by double digits.
“Just to put that into perspective,” he said, “the only teams that have more than that are the tanking Jazz and the tanking Kings. That is not a title-contending stat.”
The Lakers have also shown almost no ability to beat top teams. They won a close one against the Spurs back in early November and beat the Nuggets just over a month ago, but other than that, they’re winless against the top four in either conference, losing by over 20 points per game in 11 games.
Many fans only look at the standings or the big names on each roster, but Tim Bontemps explained why point differential is such a big deal. “There’s a reason why point differential and net rating is a longtime indicator of how good a team really is,” he said. “Your clutch games, as Tim said before, are a lot of luck and a lot of randomness.”
“Consistently winning by a lot is a much better indicator of how good your team actually is,” he continued. “This game was a prime example. You watch the Celtics and you watch the Lakers. Yes, the Lakers have three superior talents, particularly on the offensive end. The rest of their team is not good enough to hang with these elite teams. It’s just not, which is why a lot of these games end up sliding away from them like this one did, pretty comfortably as the game played out.”
Last year’s Thunder had the best net rating in history, and as most people predicted, they went on to win the championship. The Lakers currently rank 18th in the league in net rating, putting them behind teams such as the Clippers, who started the season 6-21 and are currently 10th in the West, and the Magic and Hornets, both of whom are play-in teams in the East as of now.
The Lakers will get a lot of press from now until the end of the season simply because they’re the Lakers, but some serious work is going to need to happen before this team is a serious playoff contender.
