NBA analyst Tim Bontemps reckons the Los Angeles Lakers have not made good deals during the off-season. Lakers haven’t roped in young players and significant names during the summer and it could once again led to their downfall according to a lot of experts.
In fact, the Lakers were recently interesting in bagging the services of Kyrie Irving but they haven’t come close to finalising the deal from Brooklyn Nets. Moreover, they have been linked to Buddy Hield and Myles Turner but they haven’t been able to get the duo.
Meanwhile, the Lakers could not even qualify for the play-in tournament in the previous season due to injury woes to Anthony Davis and LeBron James. Furthemore, there were a lot of expectations from Russell Westbrook but he could not live up to the standards. In fact, the trio could only play 21 matches together for the Lakers.
Thus, there are still a lot of pieces missing in the LA Lakers, which would have made them a fierce contender for the NBA championship in the next season.
On “The Hoop Collective,” Brian Windhorst, Bontemps, and Tim MacMahon discussed the offseason of the teams. Tim Bontemps believes LeBron James has been a loser as far as the ongoing offseason is concerned.
“I think Lebron is a loser of the summer and I think it’s for what you were alluding to, in that, obviously the Lakers made this catastrophically bad Westbrook trade a year ago. We talked about Russ last week we don’t need to get into that any further.”
Bontemps continued: “But, if you’re Lebron, going into your age 38 season, and the Lakers this summer, I think we all agree they made better moves than last summer because they signed guys that were all 10 years younger than the guys they signed last summer.”
Bontemps reckons Lakers have made some deals but those players are not going to be game-changers for them.
“Now you’ve signed a bunch of younger, better bets as minimum players but there still is a roster that’s filled out with minimum players. If you’re Lebron, you’re looking around at this team and you’re saying, ‘We’re a team that is not good enough’.”
“Like, ‘We’re not good enough to be anywhere near the kind of place I want to be.’ And they don’t really have a path to doing that short of this Kyrie thing falling in their lap eventually, which I don’t think is gonna [going to] happen.”
“And frankly, even if it gets there, I don’t know if they’re still good enough because of the weaknesses they have around those three guys [James, Anthony Davis and Irving].”
