"This year's Lakers are the most disappointing team in NBA history, and it is not even all that close."
2021-22 Los Angeles Lakers win title of most disappointing team in NBA history
Ben Rohrbach
Thu, April 7, 2022, 12:47 PM
The 2021-22
Los Angeles Lakers entered the NBA's diamond anniversary season as Western Conference favorites, officially boasting four of the 75 greatest players in league history
and the list's biggest snub.
And they failed to make the
play-in tournament, let alone the playoffs.
There should be a name for that. It's called the most disappointing team in NBA history.
In retrospect,
LeBron James is 37 years old, Anthony Davis has been prone to injury throughout his career,
Russell Westbrook is the lowest efficiency superstar of his generation, and the only other player further from his perennial All-Star prime than
Carmelo Anthony is
Dwight Howard.
Some of us saw this season coming.
It is hard to make those excuses when (arguably) the
second-greatest player ever warned Twitter skeptics before the season, "Keep talking about my squad, our personnel ages, the way he plays, he stays injured, we're past our time in this league, etc. etc etc. Do me one favor PLEASE!!!! And I mean PLEASE!!! Keep that same narrative ENERGY when it begins! That's all I ask." Even if he did delete the tweet soon afterwards.
Besides, oddsmakers installed the Lakers as heavy preseason favorites to win the West, second only to the
Brooklyn Nets for the championship. Brooklyn is making its own run at the list of most disappointing teams in league history, still clinging to eighth place and a pair of chances to emerge from the play-in tournament.
The Nets lost
Kyrie Irving for more than 50 games to COVID-19 vaccine denialism.
James Harden quit on them midway through the season, and
Ben Simmons has not played since the two All-Stars were traded for each other.
Blake Griffin and
LaMarcus Aldridge are shells of their former All-NBA selves. And still Brooklyn is three games above .500, because
Kevin Durant has been good enough to win 34 of his 53 appearances.
The same cannot be said of the Lakers. They have had two of their three best players in all but five games this season, and they were barely .500 for a quarter of the season with James, Davis and Westbrook in the lineup. Anything but mediocrity from them as a collective would have put them on par with the eighth-place
Los Angeles Clippers, who have been without
Paul George for 50 games and
Kawhi Leonard for all of them.
None of this will stop the Lakers from making excuses. They already laid the groundwork. Anonymous sources have blamed coach Frank Vogel
at every turn and
all but announced his firing before season's end. Davis said the
Phoenix Suns "
got away with one" in the first round of last year's playoffs, because his groin injury cost him the back half of the series, even though
Chris Paul was playing with one arm and the Suns have beat the Lakers every which way ever since, regardless of how many of their stars are in the lineup.
The blame lies with whoever is running the Lakers. Rob Pelinka is their general manager, but former president of basketball operations Magic Johnson
recently confirmed what Davis
made clear three years ago: Stars run the Lakers. James and Davis preferred Westbrook to the sliding doors of
DeMar DeRozan,
Buddy Hield and
Alex Caruso.
LeBron called Carmelo. They recruited Howard,
Rajon Rondo,
Avery Bradley,
DeAndre Jordan,
Trevor Ariza,
Wayne Ellington and
Kent Bazemore — a certifiable
NBA 2K12 powerhouse.
They convinced themselves that their past successes would coalesce into a winning formula in 2022, haters and skeptics be damned. That was enough to convince their fans and the betting public of the same.
They sold a bill of goods. The Lakers became the only top-two favorite since preseason odds were first announced before the 1984-85 season to fail to make the playoffs,
per StatMuse. They are on pace to fall short of their odds-on win total (52.5) by the widest margin of any team projected to win 50 games in
the Basketball Reference archives, dating back to the 1999-2000 season,
The Ringer's Zach Kram reported.
This year's Lakers are the most disappointing team in NBA history, and it is not even all that close.
Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook and LeBron James earned the Lakers a title they never imagined: The most disappointing team in NBA history. (David Berding/Getty Images)
Runners-up from previous decades:
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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports
