Up against the clock all season long, the Lakers ran out of time to find solutions before their season came to an end
Time is a commodity that you can never have too much of. It’s also something that is often yearned for.
When the Lakers traded for Luka Dončić three months before the end of the season, the stopwatch immediately started counting down. The Lakers aren’t new to the pressure of time as the end of LeBron James’ career has been ticking away in the background for years.
But this was a new pressure. Now, with a generational superstar paired alongside LeBron and flanked by Austin Reaves in the midst of a career season, the question was whether the Lakers could fit all the pieces into the right places by the time the clock struck zero.
The answer, pretty definitively, was no.
The Lakers bowed out of the playoffs on Wednesday without much fight left in them. The Wolves had presented problems all series long that LA could not find answers to. A flawed roster exaggerated the issues and by the time they faced a win-or-go-home scenario, it was a little too convenient to pick the latter.
“We just probably needed a little bit more time together, first of all,” Dorian Finney-Smith said after the Game 5 defeat. “Sometimes when you got that time, you can really get on each other without thinking about somebody else’s feelings.”
Finney-Smith also represents another issue the Lakers faced this season. Had they dropped Luka into a version of the team that had otherwise spent the year playing the same basketball, the transition might have gone smoother.
Instead, Luka’s Lakers were at least the third iteration of the team, all under first-year head coach JJ Redick. The team traded away a point guard in D’Angelo Russell for DFS, forcing Austin Reaves into a new role as the team’s lead initiator.
That experiment, while successful, lasted just over a month before Luka was brought into the fold, reshuffling the deck once more. It also came at a time when both Reaves and LeBron were in a solid rhythm as the Lakers won 10 of 11 games on either side of the Dončić deal.
As much as Luka drastically raised the ceiling of the team and franchise in the present and the future, it forced a reset with time ticking away this season.
“Anytime you make a big acquisition in the middle of the season, it’s always going to be challenging and not just for me but for [Austin Reaves] and for the rest of the group on how we’re playing,” LeBron said postgame. “We went from wanting the ball to touch [Anthony Davis’] hands either off pick and rolls or post ups or elbow catches…Then that whole dynamic changed when we made the acquisition of Luka to, ‘How can we change our approach to best fit his game and center our game around his.’
“There were times where we, obviously, didn’t look so well, a couple games early on. But I think we kind of figured it out later in the season. I still don’t think we had enough time to mesh but for the time that we had, I thought we ended the regular season very well to be top three in the West.”
In reality, the trade likely should have also reset expectations for this season. It was a roster built around Anthony Davis that now had Luka in the center of the frame.
The problem, if you can call it that, was that the Lakers were too good.
Arguments can’t be made to ignore this season’s results and focus on the future when the team is soaring up the standings and sporting one of the best defenses in the league. With each passing game, it felt like the window for LeBron winning one last title was creeping open more and more.
Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images
Unfortunately, the Lakers’ peak came in March, not in May or June. The demanding, frenetic style that was required defensively due to the imperfect roster, paired with a crowded schedule, wore the team down physically.
Injuries didn’t help either. LeBron missed two weeks in mid-March due to a groin strain. Rui Hachimura missed multiple weeks with patellar tendinopathy. While they were healthy once the playoffs rolled around, the reps weren’t there.
The five-man lineup that featured most prominently in the playoffs of Luka, LeBron, Reaves, Hachimura and Finney-Smith played 108 minutes in the regular season. Comparatively, they played 86 minutes in five games in the playoffs.
The trio of Luka, LeBron and Austin played 423 minutes together before the postseason, making it the 12th most-used three-man lineup for the Lakers this season. LeBron and Reaves was the most-used two-man pairing this season for the Lakers with 1,701 minutes together. Comparatively, Luka and LeBron played a third of that time together with 567 minutes.
All of the advanced numbers were great for the Lakers with those lineups in the regular season. But it all came in an abbreviated sample size.
“We played 13 games with our rotation in the regular season,” Redick said. “We obviously wished that, I wouldn’t call it chemistry because they have chemistry, but that part of it, we could figure out better and we were in a better place and more comfortable with that in the fourth quarters of playoff games.”
Time together would not have fixed everything. Minnesota badly exposed how flawed the Lakers roster was and Redick did himself and the team no favors as well. By the end of the series, LA looked like a side out of time, out of ideas and out of energy or will to fight.
Now, they head into an important offseason. As disappointing as the ending was, the Lakers still have LeBron (presumably), Luka and Reaves as their core moving forward, which brings lot of excitement with it not just for the fans, but for the players themselves.
“It’s tough to get that chemistry on the court without any practices,” Luka said. “So, I’m really excited to have the preseason with those two so we can learn about each other on-court a lot. I look back with Kyrie when he got traded to the Mavs, we didn’t really connect on the court. Like, we didn’t really know each other’s games.
“You could see the next year, we had preseason together and it was just amazing. That’s how I look at it, not having practices and that stuff. But I’m excited about the preseason, having time to learn about each other.”
Time was of the essence all season long and it was something they ran out of. Now, it’s something they’ll have an abundance of as a long offseason awaits.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.