Daryl Morey once summed up his roster-building philosophy pretty succinctly by saying that his goal was to "get more USA Basketball team members." The 2024 roster is a pretty strong argument in favor of that strategy. The defending champion Boston Celtics are the only NBA team with three Team USA selections: Jayson Tatum, Jrue Holiday and Derrick White. The Phoenix Suns may have disappointed despite having two selections (Devin Booker and Kevin Durant), but when Durant played with fellow Team USA guard Stephen Curry under Team USA coach Steve Kerr, they won two titles together. The roster Team USA took to Tokyo in 2021 had only one pair of then-teammates: Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday, who had just won the championship together in Milwaukee. Having multiple members of Team USA on a single NBA team tends to correlate pretty strongly to winning.
The Los Angeles Lakers don't just have two members of Team USA. Right now, you could make a strong argument in favor of the Lakers having the two best members of Team USA, at least in the exhibition games they've played thus far. Anthony Davis is everywhere defensively for this team. He had 13 blocks in 88 minutes across those five exhibitions, showcasing just how lethal his combination of length and athleticism still is on that end of the floor. Lebron James has been the team's closer. He saved the day with a layup to ward off South Sudan's upset bid and scored the final 11 points to preserve a win over Germany. A straw poll of training camp participants at Team USA conducted by The Athletic revealed that James was voted the best player at camp.
Success with Team USA doesn't exactly correlate to success in the NBA, of course. The FIBA rules are remarkably kind to Davis, allowing him to camp out in the paint and pluck balls off of the rim without worrying about goaltending. James is almost 40. Having other stars around to carry the load for most of the game makes it a good deal easier for him to look like peak LeBron when it counts. But the best players in the world have gathered on one team, and they've pretty unanimously (if only implicitly) deferred to James as their alpha, and both the stats and the eye test have made explicit just how dominant Davis still is when his team surrounds him with the proper talent. That makes it all the more glaring that the Lakers haven't.
The Lakers know their team isn't good enough to seriously contend. That isn't even a matter of reporting, it's evident in the moves they've either made or tried to make. They fired their head coach. They tried to trade for Klay Thompson. They are perfectly aware that last season's 47-win team isn't getting better on its own. Yet a quick glance at their roster nearly a month into free agency shows a roster that has no other real mechanism for improvement. Only two roster spots have changed hands this offseason. Taurean Prince and Spencer Dinwiddie are gone. Dalton Knecht and Bronny James have taken their places. It feels like a pretty safe bet to say that two rookies aren't taking a team from the Play-In to the Finals. In truth, the Lakers have probably gotten worse if for no other reason than Father Time's undefeated record. James and Davis missed 17 combined games last season. What does this team look like if that number is in the 30s or 40s next season? Given James' age and Davis' injury history, that feels like a pretty likely outcome.
So here we have a duo that is simultaneously proving in front of the entire world just how capable it still is and a front office that is doing very little to actually maximize however much time it has left with that duo. If there's reluctance on the part of the Lakers, well, it's justified to an extent. Again, James is old and Davis is injury-prone. As counterintuitive as it sounds, being good enough to win the championship is only a small part of actually winning the championship. You need to stay healthy and you need to get a good bracket and you need the shooting variance to break your way and you need a dozen other minor factors to work in your favor. What we are seeing on Team USA is the best possible situation for James and Davis: limited minutes, perfect teammates, mismatched opponents. Of course they look great in this light. Doing so in the NBA is a different matter entirely.
But if the Lakers have this much doubt... what's the point of keeping this team together at all? The Warriors tried to trade for James at the deadline. Davis could fetch a haul if the Lakers ever made him available. If you don't believe your team is worth investing in enough to actually compete for the title, why not tear it down and start preparing for whatever version of the team hopefully can a few years down the line? We're talking about a 17-time champion here. Is there really anything to be gained by winning 40-something games and getting knocked out in April? The Lakers, obviously, have not taken this approach either.
The Lakers have certainly made news this offseason. Even if this wasn't the intent, the JJ Redick hire and Bronny James draft pick are going to keep them in the headlines all year. But from a practical perspective, it's startling just how little they've actually accomplished in either direction this offseason. Failing to land Thompson or trade first-round picks for higher-end supporting players is one thing. That they haven't even been able to offload the minimum salaries of players like Cam Reddish or Christian Wood is another. Most of the time, moving players like that is only going to cost a second-round pick. The Lakers could've at least made some minor, cosmetic upgrades if they'd had a roster spot available. But paying even the meager price to clear a roster spot is a bridge too far?
Perhaps the Lakers are planning to approach this season the same way they approached the 2022-23 campaign: make James and Davis prove they deserve the pick investments it would take to improve, and if they do so, go for it at the deadline. But considering how close this team is to the second apron, actually planning for that now seems unnecessarily restricting. If you want to improve, it's almost always easier to do it over the summer.
All of this begs the question: what exactly is the plan here? They have a championship-caliber duo that they appear neither eager to support nor break apart. They won't trade their picks for veterans and they won't trade their veterans for picks. If there is a plan here, it appears to be as simple as "do nothing."
What is actually gained by doing nothing? The answer is somewhere between "nothing" and "something." The middle ground between contending and tanking that the Lakers are trying to straddle comes with the least championship equity of their three possible paths, but if you consider goals beyond hanging an 18th banner, it actually makes a bit of sense.
The Lakers, perhaps more than any other NBA franchise, are a team steeped in history. Being the uniform LeBron James wears as he plays with his son for the first time, and then eventually retires, has no practical value. The Lakers are in essence paying for the world's most expensive YouTube clip. In cold, rational "championship or bust" world, that really isn't something the Lakers should value. In a realistically sentimental one, it is something the Lakers historically do tend to care about.
Say the 2024-25 season does end with another bland 40-something win record and an early exit. All the Lakers will have gained is that eternal YouTube clip, but the passage of time carries its own benefits. The Hawks own their 2025 first-round pick. It is totally unprotected. Let's say the Lakers do know that they have to rebuild eventually. Tanking this season is off of the table no matter what. That doesn't necessarily mean that standing pat is the proper rebuilding move. After all, James and Davis could lose trade value over the next year. The 2025 pick is a sunk cost. But optically speaking, the Lakers probably don't want to deal with the embarrassment of willingly handing the Hawks a top pick. By waiting a year, you retain the veneer of competitiveness and then reorient yourself on a timeline that includes much more flexibility.
The Lakers can do just about anything once that 2025 obligation is met. They control six of the seven first-round picks that come afterward, with only the 2027 pick going to Utah carrying a top-four protection. If they want to tank starting in the 2025-26 season, they are freer to do so. If they want to try to win and trade those picks for veterans, that's on the table as well. You might even be able to get that fabled third star with three unprotected picks, three unprotected swaps and a couple of internal youngsters. If you just want to kick the can down the road a bit until that 2027 obligation to Utah is met, well, that's on the table.
It's worth pointing out here that the 2025 pick is a sunk cost. It's gone no matter what, and even if it's embarrassing to hand the Hawks a high pick, it doesn't hurt you any more than giving away a low pick does. As the Nets of the late 2010s showed, your best bet as a big-market team is just to prove competence. Make the best of your situation, show that you have a front office with a plan, and eventually, opportunities tend to present themselves. Players want to play for the Lakers, but they want to play for a Lakers team that knows what it's doing. This summer has been defined in part by rejection. From Thompson. From Dan Hurley. From assistant coaches. Even from cheaper free agents like Gary Trent Jr. The desire to be a Laker is usually outweighed by the desire to be a part of a team that has a coherent plan.
And the plan for the Lakers, at the moment, appears to be stalling until the right plan presents itself. That's not especially encouraging, and it becomes all the more befuddling the more James and Davis continue to thrive for Team USA. They are proving fairly comfortably right now that they are still capable of leading a champion, whether it's in Los Angeles or somewhere else. They don't have time to stall. There is a very real chance that the 2024 Olympics represent James' last genuine chance to win a championship of any kind as a basketball player, and this front office's indecisiveness is the biggest reason for that. The Lakers have done the hardest part. They've fulfilled Morey's plan of accumulating American Olympians. If they continue to botch the opportunity that having them creates, well, that says everything you need to know about the state of this franchise right now.
