The Lakers are toast.
No. Wait. With the appropriate amount of butter and some strawberry preserves, toast is pretty good. Top it with some peanut butter, banana, and honey for a killer snack too. Or maybe with some avocado and a poached egg for you hipsters. Yeah, toast is actually totally fine.
The Lakers are not totally fine. The Lakers are broken. Sorry to disparage you, toast.
After a 113-105 loss to the Clippers on Monday night, the Lakers playoff hopes basically evaporated. Sure, there’s still a path for them to get to the playoffs just as there is technically a path to home ownership in the Bay Area for a couple making a combined 200K a year. That path is not at all likely. It’s just semantics now. In a week or two the Lakers will be officially eliminated from playoff contention. The climb is too steep; there are too many teams to hurdle to get there.
It’s over.
I’ll save this season’s obituary for another day, but let this serve as the pretext.
Ravaged by injuries, a flawed roster construction, more injuries, not good enough coaching, a too late attempt to shore up roster weaknesses, more questionable coaching, and woefully inconsistent play by every player on the roster (either offensively, defensively, or both), the Lakers have cratered. They’re currently 4 games under .500, 3-7 in their last 10 games, 7-13 in their last 20 games, and simply do not play with the urgency that their current situation requires.
The slices of the blame pie should be thin and divided equally. So thin, in fact, multiple people can have a second, or even a third, serving after gobbling up their first portion. Again, we’ll go down the line at a later date, but no one is safe from the scorn born from a season that has gone the way this one has.
My apologies to those who came here looking for a glimmer of optimism. People have told me I am a voice of reason when it comes to analyzing this team. All too often I peer into the fire breathing mouths of twitter take artists and try to dismantle the nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of that on these internet streets today, but like Rajon Rondo after getting screened, I’m not making the attempt to fight through today.
Ya’ll be good.