The Los Angeles Lakers didn't add a single veteran on a standard, NBA contract this offseason. The two roster spots vacated by Spencer Dinwiddie and Taurean Prince were filled by rookies Dalton Knecht and Bronny James. Sure, the Lakers tried for veterans in the ways that they absolutely had to. There's no reason not to sign Klay Thompson if LeBron James is willing to pay for it, after all. But they didn't exactly go the extra mile to improve over the summer. They wouldn't even sacrifice second-round picks to dump an older player like Christian Wood just to create the roster spot necessary to sign a minimum-salary free agent.
There are a handful of possible explanations for that inaction. The Lakers did make a coaching change, and they banked quite a bit on JJ Redick being an improvement over Darvin Ham (which, to this point, he has been). The role players largely weren't healthy a season ago. Knecht was widely perceived as a steal at No. 17 overall, with some mock drafts placing him in the top five. There was an outline for this season in which patience made sense. Take a 47-win team, make it healthier, throw a top rookie into the mix and get more out of everyone through superior coaching and suddenly, you're looking at a win total in the 50s. It wasn't likely. It was plausible if you squinted hard enough.
The more cynical, but simultaneously more realistic, motivation was uncertainty. The Lakers didn't know how good they could realistically hope to be, because for all of the things that went wrong last season, one big one went right: the health and productivity of their best players. James and Anthony Davis played in all but 17 games a season ago. In the three seasons prior, they averaged around 60 combined absences per year. Both earned All-NBA honors by playing at roughly the level they'd held throughout their Laker tenures. The Lakers could weather the supporting-cast storms a season ago because they had two superstars. Now, it seems, they might only have one.
What LeBron's numbers say
James remains a very productive NBA player. Pretty much any other player would be happy averaging 22 points, nine assists and eight rebounds. James isn't any other player. To him, that represents meaningful decline. He's shooting his worst percentage from the floor since 2007 and scoring less points than he has since he was a rookie. All of his paint scoring numbers are down and he's missed all 19 3-pointers he has attempted in his last four games. He can still ramp up defensively in do-or-die stretches. It is generally worse than it's ever been.
What exactly is James at this point? A lower-end All-Star? He'll make the team off of fan-voting. The metrics are a bit more pessimistic about where he stands in the league's hierarchy. Among the major, widely-available catch-all metrics, James entered Wednesday rankked in the top 24 in the NBA in only VORP, in which he comes in at No. 23. He starts to dip meaningfully when it comes to Box Plus-Minus (No. 34) and PER (No. 37). Bball Index's LEBRON, which is literally named after him, ranks him at No. 80. He's only No. 90 in Win Shares, and falls to 123 when you measure Win Shares per minute. All of this feels like an appropriate distillation of the 2024-25 James experience. On some nights, he's still great. On others, he's only good. The truth is still somewhere in between.
There's nothing wrong with that on the James end of the equation. Somewhere between good and great is remarkable for a player in his age-40 season. James is currently on track to break league records in both points and assists per game among quadragenarians, and he trails only Karl Malone as a rebounder. But the Lakers aren't built for James to be great for an old guy. They need the description to end at great.
Despite the coaching upgrade the Lakers got in Redick, the core problems with the roster still remain. Knecht added some shooting, but the Lakers still rank 25th in 3-point attempts and 19th in 3-point percentage. The defense remains problematic to say the least. The Lakers rank 24th on that end of the floor because virtually all of the offense-centric perimeter players the Lakers rely on to support the aging James are turnstiles defensively. The eventual return of Jarred Vanderbilt will help, but considering how long his injury has dragged and what a drain he is to an offense, it's not a full-fledged solution. They've steadily declined as a rebounding team since the 2020 championship. They rank 25th in rebounding rate now.
These holes are growing even more glaring because James can no longer singlehandedly patch them. He's no longer superhuman, just another valuable player who can be expected to do his own job but not anyone else's. The reality facing this team right now is that it needs the sort of drastic roster changes the front office didn't make over the summer if it has any hope of being competitive in a tight Western Conference.
What do the Lakers need?
At a bare minimum, the Lakers need two things. The first is a second, playable big man. The option to play Davis at power forward some is valuable, but really, the Lakers just fall off of a cliff whenever he steps off of the court. The second is a true 3-and-D wing. The Lakers paid Max Christie a lot of money hoping he could grow into this role. He's mostly struggled and even fell out of the rotation for a period earlier in the season.
Center is a relatively fixable problem. They tend to be affordable. You've surely seen the wave of Jonas Valanciunas rumors. It's not as though Washington is getting much use out of him at the moment, so a swap involving Gabe Vincent and some second-round picks feels feasible.
Wings are more expensive. Think of how many the Lakers have been linked to over the past few years. Jerami Grant. Kyle Kuzma. Everyone on the Nets. Getting a good one for less than a first-round pick is usually close to impossible. The Lakers have only two first-rounders to trade at the moment, and both are pretty valuable by virtue of how far away they are, how little they can be protected under those circumstances, and, frankly, how little faith the basketball world should have in this front office. Dorian Finney-Smith isn't worth sacrificing the opportunity to tank in 2029.
Maybe he would've been if this team was close. That was the attitude the team took during the 2022-23 season. The front office effectively made James, Davis and the roster in place prove it was good enough to warrant a major trade. By the deadline, it was convinced. The Lakers gave up a first-round pick to swap Russell Westbrook for Vanderbilt, D'Angelo Russell and Malik Beasley. That led to a Western Conference finals trip.
But by virtually any measure, James isn't as good today as he was two seasons ago. The Western Conference is better. It would be irresponsible for the Lakers, based on what we've seen thus far this season, to sacrifice meaningful future draft capital in a trade meant to support another James-centric playoff push. There just isn't a player out there that they can afford who is good enough to make the Lakers a 2025 contender. There are too many problems. There's not enough star power in place. With this version of James, the Lakers are a .500 or so team.
That doesn't mean the Lakers should sit out the trade market entirely. If anything, it's worth thinking about players who would fit better after James is gone than they would with him in place. Take Trae Young and Brandon Ingram. Neither provide what the Lakers actually lack at the moment. Young, especially, would exacerbate existing problems. But both have been on the trade market for relatively reasonable prices because contenders don't want to pay huge contracts to such flawed players. It's a more palatable concept for the Lakers right now because, well, they aren't contenders. But they are going to need a high-usage ball-handler to step in for James when he eventually retires.
They could just as easily stand pat. They've gone this far without adding a veteran. James may make noise in the media around the deadline as he often does, but his leverage to do so is pretty limited right now. The threat of him leaving isn't as scary. Fellow Klutch Sports client Anthony Davis signed an extension in the summer of 2023. If they want to wait this out, allow James to retire with dignity on a team that hovers around the Play-In Tournament and then finds a new path afterward, well, there isn't too much anyone can do to stop them.
There's uncertainty baked into all of this. The Lakers are mediocre today. They're asset-limited tomorrow. And there's just no way to address both issues at the same time. They can no longer rely on the greatest player of his generation to make up for their mistakes. They're just another team right now, one without a clear path forward and a front office that wasn't even bold enough to take some low-risk, high-reward swings during the offseason. The entire theory of this team was built on LeBron being LeBron. Now that he may not be, the Lakers are going to have ask some very difficult questions about who they're going to be moving forward.
