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City of Fallen Angels: The Lakers’ tragicomedy

The post Kobe Bryant era at the Lakers begins when they host the Houston Rockets. (Source: Wikimedia, Keith Allison)
Expert
26th November, 2015
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There’s a line in Catch Me If You Can where Christopher Walken tells Leonardo DiCaprio that the reason the Yankees always win is because nobody can keep their eyes off those damn pinstripes.

The NBA equivalent of those damn pinstripes – the uniform with such history, and such mesmerising intimidation – has long been the Lakers’ purple and gold.

The Lakers were the NBA’s dominant franchise in the 1980s and 2000s, and they went to the Finals three times in the ’70s and six times in the ’60s. The ’90s, their dark, ignominious ‘losing era’, saw LA make the playoffs nine out of 10 years and win nine playoff series.

The Celtics might have more titles, but the Lakers have 10 more Finals appearances than Boston, and 22 more than anyone else. The Celtics spent 21 years in the wilderness between Finals appearances from 1987 to 2008, while the Lakers have never gone more than nine years without having a tilt at the title.

The Lakers have been the most consistently dominant team in NBA history. They are basketball’s answer to the Yankees, just with warmer weather and DiCaprio courtside. They have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a universal inevitability as fearsome as they are predictable.

In 2015, the City of Angels has seen universal inevitability give way to cosmic ineptitude – that is the power of Nick Young’s shot selection and Byron Scott’s Truman-era coaching methods.

The Lakers aren’t just bad now – they’re tragic. They’re 2-12 with the 29th ranked offence in the league and a defence that sits at 28th, which seems high. Nothing on this team makes sense. They are driving in no direction, doing laps around Mulholland Drive pretending that the monster hiding behind the dumpster doesn’t exist.

Before the season there was a roadmap to sense.

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There is real, tangible young talent on this team. Julius Randle and D’Angelo Russell are blue chip lottery picks and Jordan Clarkson showed last season that he might be a starting calibre point guard. Brandon Bass and Roy Hibbert were assets acquired for nothing, pieces that could allow the defence to approach respectability and provide a framework for the young guys to learn on without crashing and burning every night.

The problem on this team was always going to be the three-headed ogre of efficiency death called Kobe Bryant, Nick Young and Lou Williams.

Young players need selfless veterans around them to facilitate their growth. Kawhi Leonard has prospered in San Antonio under the tutelage of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and co, while Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook have spoken often of how they benefited from the wisdom of Kevin Ollie, Kendrick Perkins and Derek Fisher as they passed through Oklahoma City.

Nick Young is not Tim Duncan. He’s not even Nick Collison.

Bryant, Young and Williams are one-eyed gunners who don’t make their teammates better. They elevate no-one – the best you can hope for is that those around them just stand and watch, developing an immunity to their basketball behaviours, without being infected by their dreadful shot selection. You could survive with one of these guys on your team – but with all three contagion is unavoidable.

This debacle starts with Bryant. No, it’s not his fault that the roster construction is bad modern art, or that management offered him a $48.5 million contract that was twice his market value.

But it is his fault that he’s jacking seven threes a game when he’s only hitting 19.5 per cent of them. It’s his fault that he’s taking 19.3 shots per 36 minutes, a higher rate than in 2008 when the Lakers made the Finals, as the veteran leader of a team going nowhere.

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And it is his fault that despite being one of the savviest passers in the game when he wants to be, and is in the precise situation where he needs to be a distributor, he’s averaging his lowest assist total since the year Pat Rafter last won the US Open.

It is sad, and a little Shakespearean, watching a champion like Bryant go out like this. He is one of the game’s 10 greatest players, and for whatever his flaws, nobody that has given as much to the game as he has deserves to go out this way. At the same time, there is a Shakespearean comedy to be found in this basketball tragedy. It is all too fitting that Bryant, the game’s finest egoist, is burning on a team defined by its selfishness.

It’s also fitting that the Lakers, led by Byron Scott and his archaic coaching philosophies, are looking like victims of modernity. The once legendary Lakers mystique is dying, if not dead, and all it took to turn the knife was time passing.

In 2015, you don’t need to go to Los Angeles to be a star. Maybe you did in 1996, but not anymore. Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and LeBron James are doing just fine building their brands in sleepy Oklahoma City and Cleveland.

Los Angeles has celebrities, warm weather and beautiful women, but you know where else you can find those things? South Beach, which is where the stars have been going lately. And if a star wants to go to LA, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin are the crème brulee to Jordan Clarkson and Ryan Kelly’s half-eaten Snickers bar in a West Hollywood gutter.

There is a sense that the Lakers will just turn it around because that’s what they’ve always done. But the past does not guarantee the future, it only paints its context. And right now the Lakers’ reality is that their only ray of hope is that they might actually be god-awful enough to finish with one of the three worst records in the league and give themselves a shot at keeping their draft pick.

The future is the bleakest and blurriest that it has ever been for the Lakers. It is unpredictable and ambiguous, and for a team that has prided itself on inevitability for half a century, that is the cruellest blow of all.

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