Welcome to the State of the the Lakers, presented by DASH Radio. Thank you guys so much for coming to hang out on a Wednesday. Thank you guys for coming to hang out in the postgame show last night. We're just gonna be really short today. I'm gonna hit on three Lebron centric topics. Namely, i'm gonna hit on the Imon Schumpert interview that he did recently where he basically said that Lebron ruined basketball by going to the Miami Heat back in two thousand ten, and and that he knew what
he was doing and all that stuff. I'm gonna give my two cents. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how well Lebron has played this year and how much I've appreciated his leadership in this really rocky and tumultuous stretch from the Lakers, something that I didn't necessarily expect from him, but that I've appreciated from him. And then last week, you're gonna talk a little bit about how
everything with the Lakers isn't quite as it seems. That I know the record looks bad, and I know some of the sentiments surrounding the team is bad, but I think this team has been a lot better than you would think. And I'm gonna dive a little bit into that, but let's go ahead and get started with this and
mon Chumpert thing. So, like I said, Muncheper goes on a podcast says that Lebron knew he was going to ruin the game by going to Miami, and that that's what what he did, and that it basically implying that it opened up the door to the player empowerment era and to this incessant construction of super teams and and
and basically blaming Lebron for that whole thing. Now, there are a couple of different angles to this that are interesting because for starters, I would actually agree that Lebron did initiate the player controlled point era of player movement, because while there has been player movement in the past, and while players did flex their muscles to try to force trades to certain places, We've seen that happen with Kareem Abdul Jabbar in the past. We've seen that happen
with Charles bark Lee. We've seen that happen with even Kobe Bryant not to leave the Lakers, but threatening to leave to get them to make a move, and when they did the Paal Gasal trade. But in terms of a player waiting until free agency, communing behind communicating behind the scenes to link up free agency with peers around the league that we're top tier stars, and then joining together on a team. Yeah, absolutely, Lebron was the one
who initiated that. However, I want to defend his rationale in doing so, because there's a very important difference with his situation in any other situation in NBA history. First of all, Lebron immediately before he ever put on the jersey was facing pressure akin to what you saw from
Michael Jordan's and from Kobe Bryant. After he started to get established in the league, he was being compared to the Mount Rushmore of basketball players before he ever dribbled a basketball in an NBA game, that came with a great deal of pressure. And in his specific circumstance, he didn't have the same beginning era of his career that
his peers did. Michael Jordan's had Scottie Pippen coming up now while he was struggling to get through the Pistons, and while he had some playoff flame outs early on, he had this clear and obvious carrot in front of him in the form of Scottie Pippen, a guy that he had to have known would eventually be one of
the best players in the NBA. And while they did overcome adversity to beat the Pistons, a large part of that was Michael and Scotty coming into their physical primes, coming into their mental primes, and just becoming a really devastating basketball duo that nobody could mess with for the better part of a decade. His circumstance was nowhere near similar to what Lebron was dealing with with Cleveland. Same
thing goes for Kobe Bryant. He literally came into the league playing alongside arguably the most dominant player in terms of their peak in NBA history, so he didn't have that same pressure to immediately go chase a championship. He already had three, and then, as you saw after, he had a few seasons where he struggled to get to
the playoffs and to have success in the playoffs. He literally got onto a Los Angeles radio station and said that he wanted to trade and now it turned out that that ended up being a pressure play to try to get the Lakers to bring in Pau Gassol, and they did. But the point is is that everything is everybody's a product of their circumstances. One of the reasons why Lebron decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and to join with star level teammates was because he looked at
the landscape of the league. He saw Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol having a ton of success together. He saw Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen having a ton of success together. He saw himself play one of the best playoff series is we've ever seen an individual player play in NBA history against the Orlando Magic and lose to a team that didn't even have as much talent
as the Celtics or the Orlando Magic did. And he looked at the situation and he said, I haven't a great deal of pressure on me to succeed in this organization is not providing it. And so there's a great deal of distrust that exists with Lebron and front offices. It's lingered throughout his entire career. I think it's a big part of why he's done short deals at various points throughout his career. He was hard on pat Riley
when he would pinch pennies. He was obviously upset with Dan Gilbert and some of the decisions that he made in Cleveland. Lebron has a distrust that he that exists between him and front offices that directly stems from what they were able to put around him in those first seven years. So he goes, I'm gonna take this into my own hands. I am going to control my own destiny rather than leaving it to some suit sitting in
the front office. And so he did. And for the record, he's won more championships than any franchise in the entire NBA has won since he entered into the league. So if I'm Lebron, I'm going what I did worked, guys. You know, I took my destiny into my own hands and it worked. But in terms of criticizing him for doing what he did, the reality is that he was
just reacting to his circumstances. If Lebron James had Anthony Davis coming up alongside him in Cleveland a few years younger than him that first stint, he never leaves Cleveland. That's a simple fact. In this case, he reacted to his own circumstances and the pressure that surrounded him, and
every one of you would do the same thing. If you got out of college and you immediately got picked up by a great company and there was a great deal of pressure on you to succeed at home, you would stay with that company because they're serving your needs.
But if you were working in a place that wasn't bringing the best out of you and was hurting what you were bringing home, but you knew you were good enough that if you went to another situation that you would be able to fulfill that you would leave to Lebron just took control of his situation. I think it's ridiculous to blame him for that. Is there some fallout, Yes, because now lots of other players have attempted to do
the same thing. You know, what Kevin Durant did was kind of to another level and is another There's a whole other conversation to have. I've often said that one of the things that benefited Lebron was the fact that that Heat team struggled so much, in large part because of Dwayne Wade's physical decline, that Lebron faced enough adversity in Miami that people still add a great deal of
legitimacy to the two titles he won there. I believe there's a version of that story where Wade stays healthy and they run the league for three or four years and he wins three or four championships and they look really easy, and people kind of look at him the same way they look at Kevin Durant. Kevill Kevin duran did is similar to what Lebron did in a lot of ways, obviously to another extent in terms of talent
and accumulation. But there was a version of that Lebron story in Miami that could have gone a different way. I've often said that the best thing that happened to Lebron in terms of his individual development as a player and in terms of his own legacy was Wade's decline, because it forced him to face the realities of his own shortcomings and to become a better basketball player, and asked it made him struggle to win the championships that he won, which inherently gave a whole a whole new
layer of legitimacy to the titles that he won. You know, I'm not sure what he mean on Shepherds After with that interviewer with that quote, I just vehemently disagree with it, and I wanted to have Lebron's back in this case, alright.
Moving on to the way he's played this season. You know, after the game where he elbowed Isaiah Steward in the face, I warned like our fans to be prepared for Lebron to potentially go down a very dark path, a path that I've seen him go to a few times in his NBA career, where he very clearly passive, aggressively pouts his way through a negative situation until things kind of come back around to what he wants. We've seen that in a handful of different situations he was kind of
in terms of his body language. He was checked out quite a bit in two thousand four team during that Spurs playoff series. That happened again in two thousand ten against the Celtics where he had a rough ending to that playoff run where his body language was pretty poor. And then you see him turn around in a new situation like he did with the Heat in two thousand eleven or with the kaz in two thousand fifteen, and
have a renewed sense of invigoration. We even saw that in his first year in Cleveland, when he earned excuse me, in his second year in Cleveland, when he was frustrated with David Blatt. There's a lot of bad basketball from Lebron at the beginning part of that season, and then David Blatt went out the door, and Lebron re engaged and went on one of the best, most dominant stretches
of basketball we've ever seen from him. This is something we've seen a lot in his past two thousand nineteen, the bringing wine to the bench and some of the passive, aggressive behaviors that he's shown. He has shown a tendency to be a really good leader when things are good, but a leader that struggles with his own you know, uh, you know, his own tendencies to the way the way he copes his coping mechanisms with bad situations, and the
negative impacts that can have on a team. Well, I thought we might be heading down that route again this year. Into Lebron's credit, he's actually done nothing but hit the gas since that game. Not necessarily since that particular game,
but in the in the games following that. I keep pointing to that triple overtime lost to Sacramento, but We've seen Lebron this season actually get more and more engaged as things have gotten worse, and I'm hopeful that Lebron has learned his lesson from some of his previous endeavors
on that front. And it appears to me that this is gonna be exactly what we need to float this team until they can either one get whole and healthy and things will work, or until they can make a trader to that better suits what Lebron and a D do well on a basketball court. Regardless of how you feel about this roster construction, the most important thing is Lebron in a D looking like Lebron in a D.
And right now the Ron looks like Lebron. We're on I think about an eleven game stretch here where he's averaging twenty eight and I think like twenty eight and a half points a game. He's averaging the highest true shooting percentage of his Lakers career, the fifth highest of
his entire career. Lebron is playing amazing basketball right now, and I just wanted to give him some credit because I was legitimately worried that he was about to head down that traditional passive, aggressive Lebron path, and instead, all he's done is put his head down and work harder and do his best to carry this team. And that's not easy to do. It's hard to go out there like he did against Phoenix last night and play as well as he did knowing he doesn't really have much
of a chance to win. That is the exact, you know, concoction of an environment that would typically bring some of the darker parts of Lebron's personality out, and all he's done his fight through it. So credit to Lebron. Alright, last topic for the day, I wanted to talk about
the Lakers and some of their struggles this season. I talked a little bit about this last night, but I was a little annoyed by some of the press and the sentiments surrounding the Lakers, not just from outside of the Laker fan base, but from inside of the Laker fan base. After this recent stretch of games. Now, I was as frustrated as anybody about the first couple. You know, the first month, month and a half of the season,
the Lakers were playing very uninspired basketball. You were getting very poor effort, not just from the stars, but down the roster, the lineup decisions that Frank was making made little to no sense. We were seeing a lot of Rondo. We were seeing Rondo and Westbrook together. We were seeing DeAndre Jordan playing with the starters, Lebron and a D. Both We're taking a heavy diet of really difficult jump
shots that didn't make a ton of sense. And what you saw was as things got worse and worse and worse, eventually that switch flipped. Lebron and a D turned it up. They sharpened up their shot selection, They made a greater effort to pressure the rim. They played better on the defensive end of the floor. It trickled down the roster. Frank got rid of some of the poor lineup decisions that I just mentioned, and the team started playing better.
Like I said, over the course of that seven games, or excuse me, that ten game stretch before the Anthony Davis knee injury, the Lakers were seven and three. They were really good on offense, and they were really good on defense, and Lebron was playing m VP level basketball, considered in the conversation for best player in the world
level of basketball. Like I said last night, ironically, Anthony Davis is the only one that hasn't really quite kicked it into high gear yet, particularly on the offensive end of the floor. But this team was clearly trending in the right direction. Like I said, I truly thought they
were gonna beat Minnesota. In that game, somebody fell into Anthony Davis's knee on a very unfortunate play, and then a COVID outbreak hit the team, the same COVID outbreak that's hit about a third of the league, nearly a
half of the league at this point. And as a result, they've lost three games in a row, one where Anthony Davis went down and the team had the life sucked out of them, a second one where they showed amazing effort on the road in Chicago, missing damn near half their team, more than half their team, and they almost won if it wasn't for a bunch of crazy clutch
shots from demarda Rozen that were contested. And then they lost to the one of the very best teams in this entire league who's full and healthy, in the Phoenix Suns. And even in that game, they showed a great deal of fight. And so I struggle to understand where a lot of this pessimism comes from. Again, and the totality of the picture hasn't gone as well as you would have hoped, of course not, but this team has clearly
been trending in the right direction and ben derailed by injuries. Yes, it's gonna get ugly over the course of the next month, potentially because they're gonna have to try to figure out how to win games. Of that, Anthony Davis, But this
is the last thing I'm gonna say. When push comes to shove, when this team ends up in a playoff series against somebody, you're going to have to play a lineup that's gonna have a front court of Anthony Davis, Lebron James and Trevor Reza in a backcourt of Russell Westbrook, and a role playing of their role player of their choosing either a guy who can do well on the defensive end like Austin Reeves or a th t or an elite shooter someone like Malik Monk or Wayne Ellington.
They are going to be a royal pain in the ask to beating those environments, and chances are in those settings they're gonna have the two best players on the floor, and at least the best player on the floor. When we're looking at Lebron so all I'm saying is it could be a hell of a lot worse. There are a lot of teams out there that don't even have nearly the same ceiling that this team has. Yes, they struggled to start the season, but they had fixed a
lot of their problems. They were clearly trending in the right direction, and they have still a ton of room to grow. And the last that I'll leave you with is that the Lakers have been outscoring teams by almost eleven points per one hundred possessions when Lebron a d and Russell Westbrook on the floor, without DeAndre Jordan and
Dwight Howard. And that's with all of the sloppy habits, that's with Leron and Anthony Davis struggling to start the season, that's with rust being horrible to start the season, that's with all of the issues that we've seen throughout the season, those lineups have still performed that well. This team is massively trending in the right direction. There's a bright future here as long as a few things break their way.
It's not all doom and glue. And they have a couple of trades to make I know, everyone jumps on th h T after a rough game last night. But the truth of the matter is teams around the league do value him. Why because he can guard, and he's twenty one years old, and he's super strong, and he's got a great set of physical tools, and he projects to be a good shooter one day. He's showing all of the signs that we look for at with young players and whether or not they'll be a good shooter.
I think this team is sitting as good as it could under a really, really tough set of circumstances. And the truth of the matter is it's one of the silver linings here is the injuries, particularly to Anthony Davis, have forced the Lakers to lean into small ball, which is something that I have repeatedly said is their true identity and something that I think Anthony Davis easily plugs back into. So I'm gonna continue to stay positive. People ask me today on Twitter, when will you give up
on the Lakers. I will give up on the Lakers the same way I gave up on them last year. When Lebron or Anthony Davis can't finish a playoff game, that's when I'll give up on the Lakers. Before that, it's all wishful thinking the Lakers when Lebron and a d play suit up, when damn you are all their games. Okay, they lost more than usual this year for a bunch of different reasons, but it was early in the season with a bunch of new fit and a bunch of
new role players. You and I both know all of you, and I know that when push comes to show, just like last year against Phoenix, when Lebron and Nadi are on the floor and they are unhealthy and they are engaged, they are a royal pain in the has to beat. And every other team in the West and every other team in the NBA knows it. All right, That's all I have for tonight, guys. This will be posting here on This will air on DASH Radio tomorrow morning at
seven am Pacific Standard time. It will be on the podcast speed shortly. Thanks as always for your support, and we'll see you for the postgame show tomorrow night.