As we are now two full weeks and seven games into the season, most of us have seen enough to begin overreacting to team and player performance, which is the fundamental role of any fan. Twitter is already afire with debate over who should and should not play, how Luke should fix the offensive issues, […]
Lakers Analysis: What to Make of Brandon Ingram’s End of Year Surge
Brandon Ingram is perhaps the most interesting and important player on the Lakers as we begin this new season. Is he a blue chip prospect who will make repeated all star visits in his prime, or is he going to end up “just” a really good role player? Where he falls on this spectrum will […]
Lakers Salary Cap Picture After Trading D’Angelo Russell and Timofey Mozgov
Trading D’Angelo Russell and Timofey Mozgov to the Nets for Brook Lopez confirms that Magic and Pelinka see maximizing and using cap space as their priority for building out the long term roster. I believe the Russell trade was a serious mistake for several reasons, but won’t litigate the issue here, and will instead focus […]
Lakers Team Building Options Part I: The Slow Rebuild
With a new front office entering their first offseason, and a collection of exciting but unproven young players, the Lakers’ future feels wide open. The team could literally go in dozens of different directions over the next few years, depending on the front office’s team-building philosophy, how the young core develops, and in response to […]
The Lakers and Projecting the Market for 2017 Free Agents
With the Lakers’ season over and the new front office frequently emphasizing free agency as a means to strengthen the team, fans have been focused on ways to create more cap room and targeting potential free agent targets. This may just be my impression, but it sounded like the primary justification for hiring Pelinka was […]
Paul George and the Lakers Salary Cap Future
With Magic and Rob Pelinka taking over the front office, fans are understandably excited about where they can take the Lakers over the next few years. One huge component of this future will be whether the Lakers can (finally) lure first rate talent to join the young core, particularly given Magic’s potential gravitas as a […]
Where Are We: From Autopsy to Assessment of the Lakers Future
Where are we? How did we get here? And where are going? The fundamental questions of theology hang over this Lakers season, particularly as the losses mount. The team is in the midst of perhaps their most interesting rebuild, at least that most of us have experienced. Through a perfect storm of disasters, lottery luck, […]
Thinking About Luke’s Offensive Philosophy
We know from everything Luke has said, taught, and done that one of his core coaching philosophies is the need for an unselfish team approach to offense. He speaks more of ball movement than perhaps anything else, and recently emphasized the importance of achieving 300 passes per game as a team. This philosophy is unsurprising […]
A Statistical Analysis of the Lakers Preseason
Laker fans are understandably anxious to find quick evidence of two things as the season begins: Can Luke transform the way the team plays to create meaningful schematic advantages (like other great coaches), after suffering through two years of Byronball? Are the young players, individually and as a group, making the kinds of developmental strides […]
The Lakers’ Steep Climb to Becoming a Good Offensive Team
Luke Walton’s hiring rightfully gives Lakers fans hope that the team is trying (at least now) to rebuild in the right ways. The move evidences a humility the team has not seen before — instead of hiring some insider that can restore the team to glory by reinforcing what the Lakers did in the good […]