The Los Angeles Lakers dropped a game to the Magic Monday night, 118–106, in Orlando. There are worse things. The Magic are experiencing a rare patch of reasonable health, and in an otherwise nearly lost regular season they've managed to hold their heads above water at their home arena. Losing stinks—Nuke LaLoosh would say it's, like, worse than winning—but for the Lakers this is just a loss. Rub some dirt on it, I say.
Far more troubling was the home loss Saturday night to the Chicago Bulls. This was supposed to be a get-well game, with LeBron James returning to action following a seven-game absence to tend to a groin injury. The Bulls aren't exactly food, having now won 10 of 15 to pull into the East's ninth seed, but that's a second- or third-rate basketball operation over there, on the precipice of another gruesome rebuild, and the Lakers think of themselves as contenders. With James returning, and in the final game of the last significant homestand of the season, and with designs on righting a recently wayward ship, you would expect the Lakers to make a statement against so measly a foe. Instead, the visitors summarily karate-chopped the Lakers' buttcheeks to hamburger, in a drubbing so severe that Bronny James was given almost seven minutes of supervised sandbox time (naturally he missed all four of his shot attempts). The guys who shredded the Lakers are just guys: Coby White put up 36 points on 17 shots; Josh Giddey came two steals shy of a goddamn quadruple-double, and posted 17 assists to just two turnovers. Matas Buzelis (in fairness, he might someday become more than a guy) went for a career-high 31 points.
With apologies to the proud lads of the Bulls and Magic, Lakers fans are right to expect either of their team's superstars to make a light dinner of any two of these well-meaning youths. James, at least, looks unwell. He's standing around a lot, trailing plays in transition, and attempting to survive defensive sequences with as little movement as possible. The Lakers are a slow team, pace-wise, and they are an achingly slow team when they aren't getting stops. When LeBron isn't a defensive force—the Magic posted a hysterical 134.7 offensive rating with James on the court, the Bulls a 136.5—the Lakers are stuck in half-court mode. They're not yet real great at that in the Doncic era: They've been playing deeper into the shot clock than they were before the trade, and shooting worse overall and generating fewer three-pointers when they get there. There's a monster to be unleashed via the Doncic-James pairing, where they score with such fantastic ease that they can largely loaf around at the other end, but while these two are still adapting to one another—and while they still have to share the court with Jaxson Hayes and Jordan Goodwin—the Lakers have to get stops. Right now, they simply are not.
Monday's result was Los Angeles's third straight blowout loss. This is a bad time to be sagging. The Lakers have now lost seven of 10, and are on the road for the rest of this week, and their schedule stiffens starting Saturday, when they will play five of six against fellow Western Conference contenders. They're presently hanging onto the West's fourth seed, but the sixth, seventh, and eighth seeds have won a combined 23 of their last 30 games. The Lakers are just three games above the play-in, and the conference is getting feisty around them. The heinous and miserable Phoenix Suns have won four straight; even the self-combusting Dallas Mavericks are welcoming Anthony Davis back into their rotation for the season's final weeks. There's a nightmare scenario out there, where this insanely cursed Mavs team grabs possession of the 10th seed and the Lakers fall to the seventh, and the two teams wind up sharing a court for a do-or-die play-in matchup. Even if the Lakers won such a matchup—even if they won handily—just finding themselves in the same neighborhood as the Mavericks would be an incredible embarrassment.
"We need the adversity," said a sweetly optimistic Dorian Finney-Smith, after Monday's loss. "Especially being a new team, we get to learn a lot about each other during tough times. You usually don't see things when you're winning. So we got the chance to grow. We're going to use this opportunity to grow." It's useful to remember that the Doncic trade was about more than this season, and it should indeed be good for their core of players to learn and adjust through adversity. On the other hand, there are 11 games left in this regular season, the Lakers are holding onto an ultra-valuable top-four seed in the punishing West, and LeBron James is 40 years old. There is every reason to treat what is left of this campaign as the last best chance the Lakers will have to chase a championship with this core of players. I'm not sure they need the adversity quite as much as they need a functioning defense and to win some damn basketball games.
If the Lakers aren't tugging on sweat-soaked shirt collars today, certainly I cannot explain their confidence. They look like crap. Forecasters are issuing a Fraud Watch for the greater Los Angeles region. Stay tuned.
