Can A Trade Save A Lakers Team That Might Never Have Been A Contender?

The Los Angeles Lakers are once again trying to save their season.

Just as they were last season at the deadline, the Lakers are heavily involved in trade discussions. The Athletic's Jovan Buha broke down a number of potential options for the Lakers to upgrade, and I reported on their focus on three guards: Dejounte Murray, Spencer Dinwiddie, and Malcolm Brogdon.

Once again, the Lakers are trying to turn their season around by adding more talent with various players. (Players who, you'll never believe it, all have ties to Klutch Sports. I know, shocker.)

Dejounte Murray would give them a lightning-quick guard who is enjoying a career shooting season and, despite his slippage in Atlanta, projects as a major upgrade on D'Angelo Russell. They're hoping a shakeup in the roster will lead to exactly what happened last year, a 14-6 run from March through the end of the season that pushed them into a spot to win the seventh seed in the play-in, then make a run all the way to the conference finals.

So, if you're struggling, as the Lakers are at 21-22 and 10th in the West, just … do what you did last year. Trade for a bunch of good players, go on a run, and reach the conference finals.

If the Lakers make one of those trades, we'll break it down. There will be articles and podcasts (many of them on Action Network and Buckets) that describe the way the trades change their trajectory on the court. And it's entirely possible that everything works out, and we once again see the yellow and purple back in the conference finals.

But given the full scope of what we've seen from the Lakers since last year's trade deadline, it's time we asked an important question: are this season's Lakers underperforming? Or is this who they are, and they just fooled us last spring?

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LAKERS LAST YEAR

The Lakers traded Russell Westbrook in a three-team deal that landed them D'Angelo Russell, Jared Vanderbilt, and Malik Beasley. They made a smaller (and honestly, more impactful) trade a week earlier when they dealt for Rui Hachimura from Washington.

The revamped lineup took off. The lineup the Lakers used in the playoffs to boost their run was Russell, Reaves, Vanderbilt, LeBron James, and Anthony Davis. That lineup went 5-1 to close the season and 7-6 in the playoffs with a +2.8 net rating. This season, that lineup has played nine total minutes together. Most of that is injuries to Vanderbilt, but the absence of it consistently even since his return has been frustrating.

The Lakers closed the last month of the season with urgency and ran through the 2-seed Grizzlies and then the Warriors, who had never lost in the Western Conference playoffs. They lost to the eventual champion Nuggets, but each game was close at the finish.

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For all those reasons and more, the Lakers' preseason win total average was 47.5. They were considered (and still are in many circles, especially media circles) to be title contenders, and the justification was what we just saw from them after the trade deadline.

But in the light of day, so to speak, not only do the Lakers look much different, but so too do the teams they beat on their path.

March and April in the NBA are messy. It's not just that roughly a third of the league outright transitions to focusing on the draft and player development with an interest in losing, it's that even the good teams are often in weird places. They're either resting guys in advance of the playoffs or coasting because the heavy lifting to ensure a top-4 seed is already done. You still have to win the games, and the Lakers did that, but winning in March is different from winning in January or December. (Another piece of evidence the regular season is too long.)

That lineup the Lakers tout was great, 5-1 in the regular season. It's also only six games because LeBron James was out for most of it.

Then there's the playoffs. They shut up the yapping Grizzlies, who were the 2-seed. But the Grizzlies were without their two best frontcourt players in Steven Adams and Brandon Clarke. Without enough spacing and anything to battle with on the interior, the Grizzlies were totally outmatched. This season, the Grizzlies may have been without Ja Morant, but they might have weathered the early season at closer to a .500 clip if Steven Adams hadn't required season-ending surgery (again) and Clarke was still out.

That Grizzlies team is one of the worst teams in the league this season, and while Morant's injury is the biggest reason for that, the fact that the rest of the roster couldn't hold up shows where they were at in that series.

The Warriors series was even more impressive; again, the Warriors have lost in the Western Conference Playoffs with Steph Curry once and that's last year to the Lakers.

But look where the Warriors are now. They are firmly outside the playoffs, and everything has completely fallen apart. The Warriors came off a seven-game series vs. the Kings, and teams coming off a seven-game series are 36-50 in the following series since 1988.

Golden State was an undersized and old team wearing out. This season they are worn out.

Now, I bet the Warriors in that series because they had literally never lost a conference playoff series, and I thought Steve Kerr would figure out how to get Steph Curry loose, and they would outpace the Lakers from 3-point range. I was wrong.

But the assessment that might have been wrong there was more about how good the Warriors were than the Lakers.

We can nitpick away any good playoff run. The Nuggets beat a Wolves team who had key injuries and had just gotten Karl-Anthony Towns back, a Suns team that was a roster mess and wound up missing two starters, and then these Lakers, who we're arguing here weren't actually that good before facing a second play-in team in the Finals.

But if we're trying to understand the gap between expectations for the Lakers and reality and whether or not a trade can help them reach par, we need to start by understanding that we put the bar too high to begin with. This team just might not have been that good.

For proof, look no further than the stars. Part of the Lakers equation was that Anthony Davis and LeBron James missed so many games last year in particular that with a healthier version of them, they'll be better. After all, the Lakers over the past three seasons when Davis and James played together won at a 50+-wins pace. They just needed them healthy.

They've been healthy this season. It hasn't mattered.

James and Davis have played 38 games together, the absolute most you can expect from them given their age and injury history. The Lakers are 20-18 in those games, just slightly above .500.

Davis is averaging incredible numbers at 25 points, 12 rebounds, 3.8 assists, 1.2 steals and 2.5 blocks per game. And yet the Lakers have been outscored in his minutes on-court this season. The Lakers have only barely won the LeBron-AD minutes this season.Whether it's the roster, diminishing impact of the stars, coaching, or supporting cast fit, it hasn't been good.

A trade wouldn't just seek to improve the best minutes to compensate for the worst, it would look to flip them.

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IS A COACHING CHANGE THE ANSWER?

A popular notion is that the real culprit in the Lakers' underperformance is coaching. Anthony Irwin, who covers the Lakers, has consistently reported on internal tension with Darvin Ham, and there's been national reporting on the situation as well.

(Irwin notes in the link above a pretty clear reason why Lakers ownership and the front office continue to stick by Ham; moving on from Ham hurts owner Jeanie Buss and GM Rob Pelinka's standing in the ongoing palace intrigue power dynamics that are a constant there.)

We can set aside the question of whether or not Ham is the problem with the Lakers and whether a potential replacement like Doc Rivers is the solution.

Because the question itself reasserts the problem we're talking about here. If the expectations for the Lakers were set by their run last year, and Ham was the coach for that team, and now Ham is to blame for their struggles, what does that say about the run last year?

Did Ham go from a championship-level coach to the one guy holding back a contender in three months?

DESPERATION IS A STINKY COLOGNE

All of this points to the broader point: the Lakers are not looking at subtle tweaks. They're not trying to go from good to great. They are struggling as a team to keep their head above water.

The Lakers won the In-Season Tournament and looked like serious contenders; I bet them to win the title after showing what they looked like when the stakes were raised. But there are a lot of games between now and when the stakes are raised that they need to win just to have games with stakes.

Firing your coach midseason, trading multiple rotation players for a new starting point guard, and potentially further leveraging your future, all of these are options considered when the ship is taking on water.

Before we ask if this team can really sail to the promised land this season, we need to ask if the boat was ever going to float in the first place. With the benefit of hindsight, it's looking more and more like a ship that had more holes in the hull than we thought.