Ready for an understatement?
This isn’t Showtime. And this isn’t fun.
This isn’t even the 2007-10 Los Angeles Lakers that made three straight trips to the finals and captured two NBA titles.
It’s a Hodge-podge group of veterans, past primes and no names. The Lakers have an egocentric star, and his name is not Kobe Bryant. Another player’s psyche is highly susceptible to breakdowns. Their coach has a warped sense of reality and apparently doesn’t see the roster like the rest of us does.
If this weren’t the Lakers, we’d ignore them, tell them to blow it up and check back in a year or two to see if they’ve made any progress.
But this is Los Angeles and these are the Lakers. The Yankees of the NBA. And drama and theater go hand-in-hand with the purple and gold.
The media will keep talking about them, but even Jack Nicholson’s waved the white flag.
The Los Angeles Lakers are a 16-21 team.
Can we stop talking about them now? If not, just let me know when, because it’s at that moment I’d love to talk about the NBA with you.
The most interesting, dynamic and contending team in Los Angeles is the Clippers. There’s a better story in terms of collapse in Boston with the Celtics. New York finally has a decent Knicks team. The Thunder are rolling in Oklahoma City, the Pacers have saved their season in Indiana, the Heat are bored in Miami and the Spurs keep fighting off father time in San Antonio.
But everywhere you turn it’s the Lakers, who frankly, just don’t matter. Lack of depth on the bench, old age on the court, chaos in the front office. Jim Buss is calling the shots, more and more frequently, if that tells you anything.
You already knew most of this. It’s nothing new. But for some odd reason, they won’t go away.
The players keep talking. Everyone involved is trying to stay relevant and pretend the Lakers matter right now. But it’s just an act.
Maybe it’s their coach, Mike D’Antoni, who continues to say outlandish things on a nearly daily basis. The man touted the return of Showtime when he took the job in November, promised things would get better when Steve Nash returned and just yesterday said the Lakers season was just starting.
D’Antoni has turned into a walking, mustachioed cliché. One game at a time? Season just starting? You’re 16-22! There’s just 45 games left in the season and it’s reasonable to suspect that in a difficult Western Conference, the Lakers need to go around 30-15 the rest of the way to make the playoffs.
Can this team win 30 of it’s remaining 45 games?
It can. But it won’t.
Which means all of this is just a sideshow. It’s window dressing on an embarrassing season. To preach to the masses to not give up hope is an affront to the masses. We all might not have made it to the NBA, but we can tell when we see a train wreck on the court and in the locker room.
We were asked to give it time, to exercise patience while this group figured it out. Many pointed to the way the Miami Heat started two years ago with Chris Bosh and LeBron James. By this point in the 2010-11 season, the Heat were winning games, not losing six straight. The Heat struggled with things like who’ll take the last shot. The Lakers struggle to get their shot at the end of games.
This isn’t a team that’s close, on the cusp and showing potential signs of greatness.
It’s a mediocre team. Kobe Bryant wants it, Dwight Howard just wants his. Steve Nash wants it, but can’t use it the way he used to. And Pau Gasol just wants to be wanted. There’s too much noise in Lakerland.
Now, for all the poking and prodding on D’Antoni, what is it that I expect him to do? Hold pressers with a drink in his hand and say things like the uncle in Home Alone: “Horrible, just horrible.”
No, Mike D is doing just what anyone would, trying to paint a face of hope and optimism on a dire situation. And Kobe can tweet staged photos that make light of reports he and Dwight are sparring behind the scenes. And the Lakers can claim a 10-point home win over a 9-29 Cavs team is righting the ship.
They can do all those things. It doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. But it doesn’t mean we have to watch.
What do we typically do when we see a proverbial sports train wreck? We watch until it’s over. Well, this is over. We pay attention to things only as long as they are interesting. Most people pay attention to politics the six weeks to two months before an election. Within days of the election being over, we’re not watching Hardball, Morning Joe or CNN as much.
We needed to see how this would play out: Kobe, Nash and Howard on the same team. How it would go, what egos would get in the way, how they would run D’Antoni’s offense, if they complemented one another (both with their play and their words in the media).
We wanted to see if this was as fun as everyone said it would be (like on the NBA preview issue of SI, above).
It’s not.
And that’s the thing with sports, you watch until you’re spinning your wheels and wasting your time. We know what’s going to happen from here on out. Is success possible? Well, as Mike D and many of the Lakers players will try and tell you, anything’s possible.
Our eyes see a different story. And it’s just not one worth paying attention to. Let’s just close the curtain on this season and focus on other things, other storylines and teams that are worth our time.
Remember Rasheed Wallace’s famous line about how the “ball don’t lie”? Meaning, if you’re given the ball and you shouldn’t have been, the story will be told with the next shot. If it doesn’t go in, the ball told the truth.
The ball isn’t lying on the Lakers season. Whether it’s turned over, bouncing off the rim and careening into the stands from a bad pass, the ball don’t lie.
And there’s no talking around that.
worldbetweenlines.com 