In an accelerated icebreaker exercise, LeBron James has organized pre-season workouts for the entirety of the Lakers roster next month in Las Vegas.
With the Lakers adding eight new players to their roster this offseason, including the long-courted Anthony Davis, Danny Green, and DeMarcus Cousins, James likely wants to jumpstart building on an off-court chemistry before the preseason gets underway. As such, the whole squad will meet up in Las Vegas in late September, for a week-long training session together led by James, according to Broderick Turner of the Los Angeles Times.
The sessions will be at Impact Basketball and are scheduled for Sept. 22-26. Each training session will last about 2 1/2 hours. The players will stay at the Wynn, and each is paying his own way.
After practices, Turner says the whole team will go out to dinner together. The pre-camp get together is a smart plan, because the team has a tighter training camp schedule than usual. The Lakers are slated to start camp on September 28th in advance of their first preseason road game, October 5th against the Warriors, before travelling to China for two preseason games against the Nets and eventually heading home to face the Warriors for three more games.
James has had a longer summer than he’s used to, with the Lakers regular season sputtering to an end back in April. While he’s been busy filming Space Jam 2 and cranking up the household recognition for his patented Taco Tuesday tradition, he’s also had a lot of time to focus on making this iteration of the new-look Lakers the real thing now that the pressure is on to deliver a championship run with the pieces that were missing last season now firmly in place.
While he may get flack for enforcing team dinners after each of these Vegas workouts, James is clearly interested in the appearance that this Lakers team is the one that runs like a family. Because all families have their dysfunction, time will be the ultimate indicator of whether or not this works.
