Judge the shot with the ball in the air. The way the Laker’s front office has acted since Magic has left is still very poor. Sure Rob had to deal with the death of one of his best friends, and I have all the sympathy in the world for him on a personal level, but this still doesn’t validate him as being good at his job. The facts still are that Lebron joined the Lakers because he wanted to be a Laker and live in LA, not because they assembled some crazy good roster. AD wanted to play with Lebron, and you make the trade for AD when it’s available. Almost all the rest of the roster was holdovers from the Magic Johnson era. Then they Mr. Magoo’d their way into hiring Vogel by fumbling the whole Ty Lue deal, but I always thought Vogel was the better hire, . The one deal I give them a ton a credit for is bringing in Dwight Howard, given the known backlash they would receive from their fanbase.

It will be really interesting how the Laker’s front office does as they move forward. I suspect they’ll have the opportunity to bring in a bunch of ring chasing vets, which again makes their jobs rather easy, but as we saw in the Doc Rivers GM era, bringing in a bunch of big name aging veterans doesn’t always work out. I think they have most of their roster coming back and as long as they have Lebron and AD, they might be favorites to repeat, but they’ll pretty quickly soon have to decide how to handle the end of Lebron’s career which will be very interesting. Pelinka in my mind still has a lot to prove as being a GM in this league.

The bubble was always going to be part a war of attrition, both physically and mentally. I think the final four teams should get a ton of credit for being as resilient as they were (all teams deserve some credit), as this was likely a very tough format to be involved in, especially for professionals. Obviously The Lakers get the ultimate credit and reward, and deservedly so.

However, I do think that in this format, with COVID and an impacted pace of schedule that teams that had less random occurrences happen out of their control were going to benefit more than they usually would, because the penalty for unfortunate situations requiring leaving the bubble (or going Danuel House) or injury was far more severe than it would be under normal circumstances. Its such a unique situation that coming months are going to be worth watching, because there is a lot of noise in the bubble data, and how teams sift through it and make decisions is going to be very interesting.

Either way, it’d have to be a multi team trade to land either which is why I said I’d rather go after Jrue if you’re gonna trade everyone besides Kawhi & PG.. The notion that Jrue has more value is true though which seems either highly unlikely

& line many have said, Fuck the lakers

Since then, the Clippers have spent the majority of the last decade as legitimate contenders for a championship, while the Lakers spent the majority hunting lottery balls. The fact that this rivalry is heating up is only a sign that the Clippers are acting like a real franchise and a real threat to the Lakers. I’m the first to admit that LA will never be a “Clippers town”, but the fact is that it’s still WAY more of a Clippers town now than it was the last time the Lakers won a championship.

1. Craig
2. Lue
3. Ham

but there are guys outside the pool who would steal the number 3 spot. I think Nate McMillan is underrated.