Laker "Upgrades": Was This Ever Really a Question?
Let me be honest here: I'm not as much a fan of the Lakers as an organisation as I am of certain players (like Magic and Shaq) and their Yankees-like determination to remain not only relevant in the NBA, but dominant.
So when I wrote my little old assessment on them, I thought what I said was obvious to everyone who follows the NBA regularly. I mean, Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson aren't winning with a young team. My suggestion that they trade rosters with the Heat was a half-joke, but half-serious.
So imagine my surprise to see Marc Stein talk as if nobody could have foreseen the Lakers losing as they did to the Suns, and then making some suggestions to help them out. Key quotes:
Yes, Stein says that the Lakers were never a championship team...well, if that was the consensus, then why were there these "Kobe finally learning to trust his teammates" stories popping up during the season? And why didn't Stein make more of a case for the Lakers getting Jason Kidd if he could see the iceberg? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Stein didn't really start hanging with the Lakers until the playoffs. Who knows?
Anyway, he's not the only one playing GM: Charley Rosen also has some tips.
The funniest thing here is that both guys seemed to have thought that Kwame Brown was going to become some kind of star in L.A. I saw that guy "play" for four years; me and every Wizard's fan could have told Rosen and Stein that Kwame is a bench player at best (credit Ernie Grunfeld for making one of the best trades in Wizard's history).
So when I wrote my little old assessment on them, I thought what I said was obvious to everyone who follows the NBA regularly. I mean, Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson aren't winning with a young team. My suggestion that they trade rosters with the Heat was a half-joke, but half-serious.
So imagine my surprise to see Marc Stein talk as if nobody could have foreseen the Lakers losing as they did to the Suns, and then making some suggestions to help them out. Key quotes:
...The concern, if you want to fret, is Bryant's patience. He will be forever blamed for running Shaq off, even though Lakers owner Jerry Buss wanted to trade Shaq more than Kobe and had the biggest say in it, but arguing about that now only distracts from the pressing issue: How much longer can Bryant take mediocrity before he starts to reconsider those plans about retiring in purple and gold?
...Jackson has always been happier coaching veterans and would surely prefer more seasoned role players around Bryant...
...Trading for Brown actually did make some sense at the time because the Lakers badly needed size. Two seasons later, though, Brown remains an injury-prone underachiever ... while Caron Butler has blossomed into an All-Star forward in the East and Washington's foremost tough guy. Worse yet, with teams going smaller and smaller in today's NBA, L.A. probably could have gotten away with playing Kobe, Odom and Butler as a trio more than it might have a few years back...
Yes, Stein says that the Lakers were never a championship team...well, if that was the consensus, then why were there these "Kobe finally learning to trust his teammates" stories popping up during the season? And why didn't Stein make more of a case for the Lakers getting Jason Kidd if he could see the iceberg? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Stein didn't really start hanging with the Lakers until the playoffs. Who knows?
Anyway, he's not the only one playing GM: Charley Rosen also has some tips.
The funniest thing here is that both guys seemed to have thought that Kwame Brown was going to become some kind of star in L.A. I saw that guy "play" for four years; me and every Wizard's fan could have told Rosen and Stein that Kwame is a bench player at best (credit Ernie Grunfeld for making one of the best trades in Wizard's history).
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