“A lot of people say, ‘Well, if you would’ve waited a couple years, then this could’ve been yours (with the Lakers),’ And I’m like, ‘In a couple years, I’m 30. I don’t want to wait. I’ve been in the league 10 years. I don’t want to wait for things to happen. I want to be aggressive, to make things happen. And I’m looking at all these young guys who are just ready, and they’re missing one piece. And I’m like, ‘I could be that piece, and I don’t want to miss my chance. James Harden doesn’t come by every 10 years. It doesn’t happen. It’s no knock on other players who I played with, but you’re talking about all these guys who are young and are going this way, going up, so I’m like, ‘Man, this is a great spot for me. A great town, great organization.’ They’re going this way (points up).”
Even if you think Dwight was dumb leaving all that money on the table, or leaving a franchise with the Lakers championship pedigree, you at least have to acknowledge the last part of that quote. Not because of what he said about the Rockets because of what he seems to be implying about the Lakers. That they, unlike the Rockets, are old and headed downward. I still don’t believe the Rockets are a legitimate contender to win a title just yet, but nobody can deny that there isn’t an awful lot of uncertainty surrounding the Lakers future. Now compare what Dwight said to what LeBron said when he decided to leave Cleveland and join the Heat in 2010:
“It is going to give me the best opportunity to win and win for multiple years. I want to win championships and I feel like I can compete down there.”
Both men changed teams because they felt another team presented them with a better chance to win a championship. But just because the Rockets are closer to a ring than the Lakers doesn’t mean they’re actually close. To give up all those millions just to cut from the back of the line to the middle was quite a gamble, but I understood it. There’s a lot the Lakers can learn just by studying the past few offseasons and examining where the good teams went right and the bad teams went wrong. They’re now the 45-year-old divorced dad who needs to relearn how to talk to women after 20 years of marriage. The most important lesson they can learn is that in today’s NBA, perception is always reality. I guess you could call this the “Fake It ‘Til You Make It Era”:
- Step 1: Win at least 45 games
- Step 2: Make the playoffs
- Step 3: Avoid getting swept
- Step 4: Overhype your younger players
- Step 5: Write your own narrative
- Step 6: Get enough people to repeat the narrative until it’s believed to be fact
If there was one thing that bothered me about everything that went on during that first week of free agency it was the way in which the basketball community spoke about the Rockets. If you’d never heard of the Rockets or Chandler Parsons before you’d probably think Parsons was the next Larry Bird and that it was the Rockets, and not the Spurs, who came within one win of a title.
How much of that talk about the Rockets’ bright future was true and how much of it was just hype perpetuated by a community that didn’t really care where Dwight signed, so long as it wasn’t with the hated Lakers? Funny how so many writers changed their perception of Dwight from him being a shell of his former self with the Lakers to now being the final piece of a championship puzzle just because he changed teams. Even though I continuously lauded Dwight for rushing back from injury and playing through pain, was there anything anyone saw from him last season that would give them them the right to say that he was back to being a top-five player before even a single game?
I get that the Rockets best players are much younger than those on the Lakers but we can’t ignore that Dwight’s decision was had to have been influenced by hype for a team that didn’t really prove that he was the missing piece. The truth is even with 176 player games lost due to injury, the Lakers and Rockets had identical regular season records and the Lakers had the higher playoff seed because they owned the tiebreaker. Neither team made it past the first round but unlike the Lakers, the Rockets managed to win two games against the Thunder once Russell Westbrook tore the meniscus in his right knee.
If Westbrook hadn’t been hurt and the Rockets had also been swept, would people have still spoken about the Rockets’ future as glowingly as either he did here or she did here? Wasn’t this the same team that lost seven straight games during the season, was an unimpressive 24-14 against teams at or below .500, and nearly choked away a playoff spot by losing four of their last six regular season games? Two teams with identical records, both eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, and yet one team looks back at their season as a rousing success and is considered the next great team while the other refers to their season as “The Season From Hell” and is now talked about like the ex-wife whose husband left her for a younger women after 35 years of marriage.
The Rockets aren’t the only team granted elite status prematurely. Why are the Golden St. Warriors, who not only lost three of their four regular season meetings with the Lakers, but also finished just two games ahead of them in the standings, suddenly considered legitimate title contenders? Is it because they upset a Nuggets team whose regular season record and playoff-seeding were incredibly skewed due to their remarkable 38-3 home record? I can’t figure out when we decided that what a team does over the course of four, six, or even 12 playoff games, against only one or two opponents, began to outweigh what they did over the previous 82. Nor will I ever understand why the basketball community has chosen to romanticize a 47-win Warriors team and magnify how they split the first four games of their series with San Antonio while simultaneously ignoring how they lost the next two games by an average of 15 points.
This is now the world we live in, I guess. Trendy teams, trending topics, and short attention spans. So many have been so quick to anoint both teams as the future with so little hard evidence there to support it. I get that both teams are finally healthy, both added respected free agents, and both have very young rosters with plenty of lottery picks amongst them. But young players, especially lottery picks, can so easily fool us into believing each of them will either meet or surpass our expectations for them. The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to concurrently develop multiple young players without hindering the progress of each of them in the process.
It isn’t just the rosters that have been so overhyped. I keep hearing about how great a GM Daryl Morey is, yet in his six seasons since he was hired the Rockets either missed the playoffs or were eliminated in the first round in five of them. Dwight Howard reportedly wanted Mike D’Antoni fired but I haven’t seen anyone mention that after 242 games, Kevin McHale still has a losing record as a head coach. But he had post moves 25 years ago so now he’s the perfect coach to lead Dwight to a championship.
Next Page: Why The Lakers Must Avoid ‘The Stink’
And that brings me back to that original Dwight Howard quote. Would he have even taken a meeting with the Warriors had they missed or been swept out of the playoffs or even considered the Rockets a team on the way up if they’d decided to tank last season rather than try to make the playoffs and win those two games?
That Westbrook injury might turn out to be the most significant reason for the Rockets winning a championship one day. Not only did it make the Rockets look better than they really were but it damaged the Thunder just enough to make anyone believe that the Western Conference was wide open. Before that series began, 14 of ESPN’s 18 experts predicted the Rockets would lose in either four or five games. That was probably because the Thunder had won five of the six games they’d played against Houston with Westbrook in their lineup and the Rockets needed 46 points and a nearly perfect shooting night from James Harden in the only game they won of the six.
Some might interpret all of this as sour grapes but it isn’t. I’m not bitter that Dwight left. I’m bitter that he was so heavily influenced into thinking that teams that hadn’t accomplished anything were suddenly looked at as legitimate title contenders. The Lakers weren’t allowed to use all of their injuries as an excuse for why they only won 45 games but other teams are allowed to use crystal balls and hype to declare themselves contenders before even winning 50 games?
What we saw this summer couldn’t help but remind me of the Summer of ’96. Had the Lakers not been considered a team on the rise would Shaquille O’Neal have left a 60-win team that advanced to the Conference Finals for one that won 53 games and, like last season’s Rockets, were eliminated in the first round? That team had youngsters like Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones, and some high school kid from Philadelphia. Even if Shaq had been influenced by what L.A. offered outside of basketball, that perception might have been what ultimately sealed the deal.
Take the biggest free agent names over the last few seasons and classify them into two different groups. The first group is made up of names like LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh; the guys who teams lusted after. The other group consists of names like Amar’e Stoudemire, Joe Johnson, and Carlos Boozer; these are the guys who teams not only settled for but also had to overpay for because they missed out on the other group and needed to save face with their fans.
Somehow one team managed to snag all three of those guys in the first group. The Lakers need to figure out what it was about Miami that convinced LeBron, Wade, and Bosh to all pick the Heat when two of them could have paired up and played for any number of teams that had enough cap space to sign two of them outright? You can’t discount the opportunity for all three of them to easily team up as the most important reason. Obviously Pat Riley’s mafia boss persona and history of success played a key role. Lastly, intangibles like the absence of a state income tax and warm weather can’t be ignored.
The Heat also had something else important going for them. Besides Cleveland, the Heat were not only the only team from the five LeBron met with that had a winning a record during the regular season, they were also one of only two to make the playoffs. The Bulls, who also made the playoffs, finished the season at 41-41 and were eliminated by LeBron’s Cavs in five games.
We’ll never know how big a role the Heat winning 45 games and avoiding the first-round sweep with that crummy roster played. What we do know is that there’s enough evidence to suggest that teams with plenty of cap space have fared better in free agency by trying to be competitive than by tanking. Even though the league’s new CBA has made it difficult to build a through free agency, and even though it has become extremely popular for teams to stink for a couple of years and try to rebuild through the draft, we’ve seen stranger things happen.
For teams like the Lakers who aren’t bad enough to guarantee themselves a top-four pick, tanking would be idiotic. There are way too many guys on this current Lakers roster with too much pride to willfully tank, anyway. Instead, the focus of the draft has to change from where they’re drafting to who they’re drafting. Taj Gibson, Quincy Pondexter, Kawhi Leonard, Jimmy Butler, and even Chandler Parsons are just a few guys who were drafted outside the lottery who are considered important contributors on teams considered title contenders. Others like Kenneth Faried and Iman Shumpert aren’t on legitimate contenders but would be welcome additions to any team in the league.
The Lakers don’t want to end up with guys like Stoudemire, Boozer, and Joe Johnson . They want the LeBron-Wade-Bosh tier. As good as this draft class is predicted to be, there isn’t a prospect in it who could convince a top free agent in his prime that he could compete for a title right away if they teamed up.
Whatever it is that differentiates an old car from a classic car is what the Lakers need to figure out this season and apply it. You can probably count on one hand the number of seasons since the late 70s when the Lakers weren’t considered at least one of the preseason favorites to win the title. Unfortunately, this upcoming season happens to be one of them. This one will be more about figuring out who stays, who goes, and what puts them in the best possible position to continuously improve within the constraints of the new CBA. All of the low expectations and pundits predicting 31-win seasons are not necessarily a bad thing. There’s currently a “Bad Luck Schleprock” cloud that’s been hovering over them since the beginning of last season.
Even if it’s likely that they’ll be 1-5 after a tough opening slate of games, 12 of their following 17 are against teams that missed the playoffs last season. Finish that stretch with a record above .500 and suddenly you’re one of the league’s early surprises and getting positive press. End it with a 6-16 record and suddenly you’re a punchline on the late night talk shows and you’re wearing that same stink that franchises like the Astros, Raiders, Jaguars, and Bobcats currently have on.
There will be no shortage of drama this season. What happens between now and April will have a huge impact on what type of team they’ll have one year from today. Here’s hoping they know it.