Lakers' Mystery Underscores Front Office Concerns , Plus We Win The Streaming Wars And More
Here we go again...
There is a mystery afoot in Los Angeles. Ok, two if you include Dave Roberts’ decision-making, but for this Lane’s Letters dispatch (delivered straight to your inbox for subscribers!), we are faced with the curious question of who is in the Lakers’ starting five? The answer may not be apparent, but the question itself reveals a major concern in the way they have approached roster-building.
Six preseason games have come and gone and we are no closer to knowing who the Lakers will roll out against the Warriors on opening night. Coach Darvin Ham’s final opportunity to gather intel was blown up on Friday against the Kings, engulfed in a fireball of injuries and precautionary measures.
The day had started off promising, with news that Russell Westbrook would move into the bench role that Lakers fans have been clamoring for almost since he arrived in LA. From there, Dennis Schroder’s finger injury was revealed, one that could keep him out of action for the beginning of the season. Then Anthony Davis and Lonnie Walker IV were both declared out, with the team not wanting to push their back and ankle injuries, respectively.
Those absences meant a meaningful look at the starting lineup was kaput. However, coach Darvin Ham and staff could still experiment with the bench rotation to see how Westbrook would fare in an environment where he could be himself without LeBron James. A much-needed silver lining!
Westbrook played 5 minutes (mostly with James) before pulling up lame with a hamstring injury, and the game might as well have ended there. There was no longer anything to be gained by playing and the Kings blew the Lakers out by 47 points, throwing their mental makeup into question and traumatizing a fan base that is already on edge after the nightmare that was the 2021-2022 season.
At least it was only preseason.
Here’s a particularly frightening thought: it’s likely that the Lakers will go into Tuesday night’s matchup against the Warriors with zero minutes on the court as a unit for their starting five. Of the starting lineups seen during the preseason, only the Westbrook-Beverley-Walker-James-Davis group used in their second matchup against the Wolves has the potential to get the nod, but that would require Ham to reverse his decision to bring Westbrook off the bench. 1
If all of this feels familiar, it should: last season the Lakers deployed an absurd 41 different starting lineups in an 82-game season. Then-coach Frank Vogel was unable to settle on a competitive starting group, with health often a complicating factor.
The thing is, this isn’t a Ham issue, nor is it a Vogel issue; instead, it’s the front office that is the culprit here. In a league where consistency is proving to be a key ingredient required to win, the Lakers have underrated the importance of role players, swapping them out like Rusty and Audrey Griswold in the Vacation movies.
GM Rob Pelinka and the front office tore down the entire roster two summers ago in order to bring in Westbrook, inadvertently removing themselves from title contention. Burning that team to the ground this past summer was understandable and, frankly cathartic, but take a look at the current roster, via Spotrac:
Not a long-term commitment in sight, save for James and Davis. A glance around the NBA shows that every team worth their salt already has a starting five clearly established, while the Lakers are still up the air aside from James and Davis.
There is merit to preserving cap space for next summer, and expiring contracts help to that end, but a salary cap sheet that looks like theirs does also means that next season’s roster will once again be made up of mostly new faces. What if Walker excels in LA? Or Troy Brown Jr proves to be the wing the team has needed so badly? The Lakers will either have to use some of that available money to pay these players (which cuts into their ability to chase free agents) or watch them walk to other teams for more money, as they did with Malik Monk this past summer.
Even if LA made moves to stay above the cap, Bird rights don't exist on one-year contracts2, so they can’t exceed the cap to retain these players without using an exception, again cutting into their free agent spending power. If these players all had three consecutive years as Lakers under their belts LA could exceed the cap to keep them in the fold, but you can't get to that point cycling through one-year deals every season.
This is why Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report calls these one-year, veteran minimum contracts lose-lose from the team perspective3: either the player doesn’t perform well enough to keep even on a minimum salary and they leave after the season or they perform so well that other teams are willing to pay them more and you lose them in free agency. The Lakers are currently caught in a cycle of one-and-done free-agent acquisitions, unable or unwilling to find anyone who will do a multi-year deal to provide consistency.
That’s not to say they can’t find success. The 2019-2020 championship team also featured mostly new arrivals, but their instant chemistry was an outlier, not the norm. It begs the question of whether that team’s incredible synergy, in part, caused the Lakers’ front office to underestimate the importance of consistency and finding a core group of role players.
The modern NBA is set up to reward teams who find players and keep them in their system, with some exception4 . The Lakers have walked a different path for just over a year now, with disastrous results. As an organization, they have been all about stars, and this way of thinking has certainly served them well over the years. But in a league where players are on the move more often than ever, we are seeing an effect where teams that have multiple years to grow and gel together are finding themselves with an advantage.
It’s troubling, then, that the Lakers continue to see role players as replaceable, plug-and-play spare parts that can be swapped out without skipping a beat. That way of thinking brings perpetual challenges every season because it’s an almost entirely new team.
And thus, the Lakers head into Tuesday’s opener with precious little experience playing together, just like last season, and, most likely, we will see the same next season. Preseason didn’t provide many opportunities to foster growth, and in a Western Conference that projects to be a gauntlet, a new roster, and a new coach will be tasked with learning how to play together quickly.
Blowing up last year’s roster is understandable, even necessary, but at some point, consistency and stability have to be found. That means multi-year deals, and maybe even ones that provide some upside to the club in the event that a player hits. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but a worthwhile goal anyway.
The mystery for the present may be who is in the starting five, but the bigger question is when will the Lakers modernize their approach to roster building?
Streaming Wars And Our New World Of Entertainment
The ability to make choices is an incredible thing, and it’s slowly but surely made its way into our TV viewing through streaming. For decades, TV viewing was largely restricted to cable offerings: buy a package and get a certain amount of channels, with the only choice really coming in whether you want 50, 100, or 150 channels.
Sure, back then some people did question why they had to pay for tons of channels when they really wanted to access 10 or so, but you paid the cost because that’s just how it was.
Until it wasn’t.
We’re now living in a world where we are more able to customize our entertainment and information than ever before. Only want to see sports content on your Twitter account? Follow sports reporters and no one else. Don’t want to see Facebook posts from that relative that gets a little too political? Mute them. Tired of waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio? Spotify can bring it straight to you, whenever you want.
And here’s the thing about having choices: once we get them, we want more. This effect was seen during the Great Awakening in the American colonies during the 1700s. A religious revival served as a reaction to the Enlightenment, providing people with new, more personal ways to worship, and as a side effect, helped to encourage democratic thinking. Essentially, the colonists suddenly wondered why, if they now had more of a say in their religion and how they practiced it, couldn’t they also have more of a say in the system under which they were governed? Enter John Locke, the idea of the social contract, and off they go.
And we all know how that turned out.
So as technology gave us more choices to shape the information that we come across each day through the internet, it only made sense that, eventually, our TV choices would follow suit. After all, demand was there for a new way to consume content, and streaming appeared to be that path to an entertainment utopia where viewers could specify exactly which channels they wanted and pay for nothing more.
We aren’t quite there yet, but where we have landed in the meantime is pretty incredible. Again, it’s all about choice. Want to watch 20 episodes of Parks and Rec in a single day? Go for it. Or pick your favorite episode of The Office? You can call up “The Dinner Party” in seconds.
Case in point: as I write this it’s 2 am and I’m up with a sick child. Instead of nothing but infomercials on TV at this time of night like when I was a kid, we are streaming LEGO Avengers on Netflix, having previously watched Spies In Disguise on Disney+. My 6-year-old doesn’t know a world where she can’t simply choose from a myriad of shows and movies anytime, anywhere.
We are in the golden era of the Streaming Wars, with countless portals offering diverse content and allowing viewers to pick which one(s) they want to subscribe to. Over the last handful of years the offerings have grown, and with that, many families, including my own, now have multiple streaming platforms in their homes.
Personally, the Lane household subscribes to YouTube TV for basic television service, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV, and now, Amazon Prime thanks to the NFL. Other options are out there, such as Paramount Plus, but we get more than enough through the services that we have, and frankly would cut at least a couple if we weren’t getting them because they came free with products that we purchased.
Here’s the great thing: again, we haven’t landed quite as we wanted to just yet and still pay for a lot of content we don’t use, but even in this time of insane inflation those streaming services combined cost significantly less than our old cable TV service.
The true winner in the Streaming Wars isn’t Netflix, or Disney, or Amazon Prime. It’s us.
As it turns out, competition is indeed a good thing for the consumer. Just look at NBA League Pass, which had its price cut by 60% this season in order to stay in line with other services in the category.
The battle between all of these streaming portals has not only controlled price but also pushed providers to new heights with the quality of their content, just like the Monday Night Wars brought the best out of the WWE and WCW5. Content quality is improving, with providers knowing that if they don’t bring the goods, viewers will go elsewhere.
Amazon Prime certainly gained a flock of new subscribers when they became the sole provider of the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, but how many of them did they lose after two consecutive weeks of snooze-fests featuring Colts vs Broncos and Commanders vs Bears? How many will ditch the service when the NFL season ends? It’s on Prime to make the case to all of these extra eyeballs that they are worth the cost, and that means better content for us, the consumers.
Quite a change considering it wasn’t that long ago that your choice was limited to cable or satellite companies largely offering the exact same channels, with price and user interface acting as the main differentiators.
Sports has long been the holdout on cable, the greatest of reasons for live TV to still be a necessity in our homes. That won’t change anytime soon, at least not completely, and for most subscribing to this substack that likely means a tether to the old ways will remain for the foreseeable future.
Still, as technology changes how we interact with the world and our choices grow, it’s important to recognize how far we’ve come. After all, life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Quick Notes
The NBA’s roster cutdown day has come and gone, and while there are still a few moves pending, like Kemba Walker eventually being waived by the Pistons, most teams now have their regular season rosters set. For the Lakers, that meant giving their 15th and final roster spot to shooter Matt Ryan.
The Dodgers suffered a heartbreaking loss to the Padres that knocked them out of the MLB Playoffs. 111 wins during the regular season were undone in just 4 days. Sports can be unbelievably cruel sometimes. Credit to the guys at Dodger Blue for all of the work they did this season.
My LA Galaxy got a win over Nashville to advance in the MLS Playoffs which means that LAFC and the LA Galaxy will clash on the same day and time as the Lakers take on the Clippers: October 20th at 7 pm Pacific. Double battle for LA, though I think it’s fair to say that LAFC and LA Galaxy have a much closer struggle for the fans in Los Angeles than the Lakers and Clippers do. Clippers players continue to get booed in public in LA.
Possible, since Ham has said that the door isn’t closed on Westbrook starting.
This actually might make it that much more important that Kendrick Nunn clicks; because he’s in his second season they will have early Bird rights on him.
For players they are great: spend one year showing out in LA’s spotlight and then cash in. It’s a fair criticism that the Lakers have signed too many player-friendly contracts during Pelinka’s tenure, and despite the cheap cost of veteran minimum deals, the 1-year length of the contracts makes them just that.
Hello Warriors’ luxury tax bill
Perhaps the greatest time in history to be a wrestling fan. It felt like every show matter so much and every day boundaries were being pushed.
Trevor, just subscribed. I follow your work everywhere. Between your written work, on camera work, and radio work, my only question is when do you have time for all of this? Good job! Looking forward to interacting with you.