The NBA‘s defending champion is smack — one heck of a smack, actually — in the middle of its biggest modern crisis, according to no less an authority than the team’s own head coach.
While Steve Kerr admits the Golden State Warriors are punch-drunk from Draymond Green‘s astonishing act of practice-court violence, the next-best team from last season is reeling, too, with the Boston Celtics left without their coach, for a minimum of a season, due to the rather novel reason of in-house infidelity.
Yet while Punch-Gate (or Draygate, or Jordan Poole-gate, take your pick), combined with the saddening Ime Udoka scandal in Beantown, has given the league the kind of preseason spectacles to delight the TMZ crowd and send those drawn to chaos and salacity into a flurry of excitement, the most eye-catching plotline of the new campaign is, somehow, situated elsewhere.
Yes, really. Even with last season’s finalists mired in you-couldn’t-make-it-up drama, the most talked-about slice of pro hoops gossip is guaranteed to come from a team that might not make the playoffs, involving a player who might not start on that team, in a development that will probably have zero impact on the outcome of the championship over the coming months.
The Los Angeles Lakers march to the beat of their own drum. So too, in a way, does Russell Westbrook. And just as the Lakers are magnetized toward grand production, so too is the audience addicted to all things purple-and-gold, regardless of X’s and O’s and schemes and scorelines and all the rest of that paraphernalia.
Basketball of the meaningful variety begins again Tuesday night, with the Lakers visiting the Warriors just after the Philadelphia 76ers hop up to Boston as part of an opening-evening doubleheader.
It has been two years, and it feels like longer, since the Lakers have been competitively relevant, winning it all in the COVID-upturned 2020 season but following it with a first-round exit, then an 11th-place washout.
But still, all eyes point toward the circus, and so it remains. The presence of LeBron James and Anthony Davis teases some potential for success, but before that can even be considered, the saga of Westbrook needs to be digested.
The latest is that the $47.5 million-a-year, nine-time All-Star has been trialed as the head of the L.A. second unit, that he stood apart from the rest of his colleagues in a preseason pregame huddle, that opinion is divided on whether the huddle fuss is a faux-controversy, that he’s being called a “beautiful human being” by new coach Darvin Ham and that he might not play on Tuesday due to a hamstring injury.
Westbrook exits final preseason game with injury
Russell Westbrook left the Lakers’ final preseason game in the first quarter with a hamstring injury. Westbrook came off the bench, which coach Darvin Ham called not a demotion but a realignment. Shannon Sharpe and Skip Bayless weigh in ahead of the Lakers’ season opener.
That’s just this week. There’s more news coming, because, er, there just is. It is the Lakers. There always is.
Other teams’ marketing departments must wonder what they have to do to get noticed on that level. The Lakers get most of the headlines when they’re good. They might get even more of them when they’re not. They’re not just on the radar, they are the radar.
“The Lakers are done with Russ, and Russ is done with the Lakers,” FS1’s Shannon Sharpe said on “Undisputed.” “I’ve never seen a dude blow off the huddle. As long as Westbrook is on this team, the Lakers will not compete for an NBA championship.”
The difficulty is that it’s tricky to shift a player earning megastar money who doesn’t play like it any longer, not when you’ve already given up so many draft picks that your next first-round selection is probably working through his middle-school social-science homework about now.
And therefore, it goes on, with Westbrook recently acknowledging the awkwardness.
“Sometimes people at our jobs don’t like us or don’t want us there,” Westbrook told reporters. “As a professional, and as a working man, I have to do my job and do it the best way I know how to be able to support and take care of my family. And that’s what I will do.”
So there’s that. There is also a lot of other stuff going on around the league. A collection of star players will return after long layoffs: Kawhi Leonard for the LA Clippers, Damian Lillard in Portland, Jamal Murray in Denver and Ben Simmons now with a Brooklyn Nets squad dripping with talent and hoping to avoid dysfunction.
Ongoing style shifts mean that the past four MVP awards have gone to two big dudes from Europe with silky skills, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić.
Kevin Durant‘s power play to get out of Brooklyn didn’t work, so he’s still there, the 76ers are seeking harmony to match their firepower, and the league itself is likely a year away from an innovative in-season Cup competition that promises to be a lot of fun.
And still, it is the Lakers, destined to be the talk of the town, every town, not just the one bearing tinsel.
FOX Bet lists the Lakers at +1300 for the title, seventh-favorites, with Boston and Golden State topping the list despite their respective doses of upheaval. James, often bullish at this time of year, was a little more circumspect than usual this time.
“We have to stack days,” he told reporters. “We have to get better every day. You know, move forward. But it begins now, the season is here.”
It is, which is about the only certainty to speak of when it comes to the league’s most-talked-about team. The season’s narrative, as ever, is beating to a familiar rhythm, whatever is happening elsewhere.
