The least surprising piece of news that has ever been reported came on Friday afternoon, when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Dave McMenamin brought word of discontent in Los Angeles. Apparently, Magic Johnson and Luke Walton had a meeting following back-to-back road losses for the Lakers, with the overarching theme of the meeting being that Walton was kind of coaching for his job seven games into the season.
There are basketball reasons why this makes sense. Los Angeles’ defense is not particularly good, Walton wasn’t hired by Johnson’s front office, a 3-5 record is less than ideal (they were 2-5 at the time of the meeting), the Lakers have used the second-most lineups of any team in the league, all that jazz. Walton won’t be the first coach fired if he’s canned, but coming into the season, it was easy to see a scenario in which he got the boot.
The inherent issue is that none of these problems are especially surprising. All offseason long, the Lakers — from Johnson to Walton to LeBron James — preached the importance of patience. It’s a young team with a ton of new faces. Having to deal with one of those things as a coach is tough, but having to deal with both of them at the same time is incredibly difficult. Walton has been expected to take the gallon of oil and the gallon of water that management gave him over the summer and find a way to mix them. Through eight games, he hasn’t done a good enough job of this, and while everyone in Los Angeles has talked about playing the long game, it resulted in a stern talking to from Johnson.
More broadly, the Lakers find themselves in a weird spot.
A rebuild is, indeed, the right way to go. Having the all-around brilliance of James can only get you so far in the NBA in 2018, especially in the cutthroat Western Conference. What Los Angeles does have right now beyond James that provides optimism, though, are a collection of talented young players — Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, Brandon Ingram, and Kyle Kuzma — who have the potential to make a fascinating core next to the best player in the world. This is where a rebuild makes sense … and is also where the Lakers are kind of stuck.
There is a sense of exceptionalism that surrounds Los Angeles, and why wouldn’t there be? It’s the most famous franchise in NBA history, its collection of retired jerseys include a laundry list of the greatest players in league history, only the Boston Celtics have won more titles, and “the Lakers” carries the same gravity as, say, “the Yankees” or “Real Madrid” in terms of the collective consciousness of sports fans. There is no reason why this organization — led by one of its most popular and revered players ever in Johnson — shouldn’t expect anything but the best.
Except for the fact that Lakers Exceptionalism, as Tom Ziller wrote back in 2016, is dead. The Lakers as an organization believe they should be the best, because the history of Los Angeles Lakers basketball says they should. It requires ignoring that the last few years of Lakers basketball have been not especially great, with the team’s focus over the last few years being developing young potential stars over viewing them as assets that exist to get an established star.
This is, indeed, an either/or proposition, because for the Lakers to truly do things the Laker way, they have to treat “getting stars” as an either/or proposition. They quite literally cost themselves Paul George — he even said as much! — by thinking they didn’t need to trade for him because he was always going to be pulled to the purple and gold. They decided to risk this once more with Kawhi Leonard. It’s not a bad strategy, as the Philadelphia 76ers have shown over the last few years, but it’s one that you have to approach with near-extreme patience.
Giving Walton a “win or you’re going to be on the hot seat” ultimatum after seven games is a sign that the Lakers aren’t actually committed to the rebuild they tacitly endorsed when James came on board. They want to be THE LOS ANGELES LAKERS, ignoring that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will a new Laker empire. A potential move on Walton this early in the season would hammer home a simple message: You cannot fully commit to a rebuild while simultaneously committing to being the Lakers.
