LeBron James has made the playoffs every year since the 2005-06 campaign. He has not missed out on participating in the NBA Finals since the 2010 postseason. Basically, the basketball world has not only gotten conditioned to watching James participate in the playoffs, but the standard operating procedure has been watching him and his teams compete for a championship.
However, no longer is James in the Eastern Conference, as he decided to move west for the first time in his career and join the Los Angeles Lakers. It was a risky move, both because of how stacked the Western Conference is and because the Lakers are built around a young core without much postseason experience. But still, they have LeBron James, so they should make the postseason … right?
According to ESPN’s Kevin Pelton (in an article for ESPN Insider, which you should subscribe to posthaste), that might be a little too ambitious of a goal for the first year of the LeBron Lakers. Pelton used Real Plus-Minus projections, which have the Lakers just on the outside looking in.
This season's projected playoff teams don't include the new-look Lakers. pic.twitter.com/TeqYtD3or6
— ESPN (@espn) August 3, 2018
Pelton clarified that James’ RPM is projected to fall to plus-2.7, a steep fall from his RPM of plus-5.0 last season. He also wrote that, if James’ fall isn’t quite as drastic, the Lakers are in.
If James drops only to a plus-4.0, the Lakers would move into eighth, and even if this projection is accurate for all teams, they would still probably be better than 50-50 bets to make the playoffs because somebody else falls out, so RPM isn’t necessarily calling them a lottery team.
Get Insider to check out the rest of these projections, but as a tease, Pelton has the Warriors reclaiming the throne atop the Western Conference with a surprise team in second. In the East, it’s a battle between the Raptors and the Celtics for the top spot, with James’ old squad missing out on the postseason by a comfortable margin.
(Via ESPN)
