After losing to the Clippers on Monday night, the Lakers are six games out of the eighth spot in the Western Conference with 18 games to play.
That is a near-insurmountable deficit to climb out of and would take the most heroic regular season effort of LeBron James’ career to get L.A. to the postseason. Given that James hasn’t missed the playoffs in 13 years, the expectations on this team for this season, even without landing a secondary star, was to end the team’s playoff drought. That likely will not happen, and as such, fans of the team are growing restless.
Last year, all we heard about was how LeBron was dragging one of his worst supporting casts to the Finals. Yes, that was in the East, but there was still a floor to how bad a LeBron team could be and fans are starting to voice their frustrations with that floor being much lower than expected.
Over the weekend, Snoop Dogg posted a video to Twitter calling for Luke Walton to be fired and for a lot of the team to be traded in order to get LeBron some help. On Monday night, a fellow musician and notable Lakers fan voiced his frustrations on Twitter, as Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers calling out the Lakers front office for signing 1-year deals for veterans and not trying to build a cohesive team.
Dear @lakers why do you do this to me? Do you realize there are fans out here that really care? This is seven years of this shit. Are you just gonna get more one year contracts in pursuit of a Star? I don’t give a shit about a star, build a team that loves and plays together.
— Flea (@flea333) March 5, 2019
https://twitter.com/flea333/status/1102819910898589697
Flea makes a valid point. The veterans they’ve added this summer haven’t been good and that honestly can’t be all that surprising. However, the idea of keeping flexibility for this summer and not committing long-term money to mediocre players wasn’t bad, it was just terrible execution with regards to who they gave the short-term deals to.
What is clear is Lakers fans patience has run short and this summer there will be no room for error for all involved. If they don’t land a star, they have to at least put together a competent roster capable of competing in the West, because if they don’t Lakers fans will call for sweeping changes at the top.
