In February 2023, it appeared that the Lakers were set to miss the playoffs for the second year in a row. Just 26 months later, they are championship contenders.
The Los Angeles Lakers are absolutely thriving now. The arrival of Luka Doncic drove this team to another level.
For the first time in years, the franchise looks like a real contender for the Western Conference. The Lakers’ outlook is absolutely yelling about where it was a few years ago.
Just two years ago, the Lakers were 25-30 years old and coached Durbinham with players like Russell Westbrook and Patrick Beverly.
Lakers GM Rob Pelinka built a mediocre team at best and transformed them into a Western powerhouse in just two years.
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In 2021, Rob Perinka stopped trading with the Lakers on a massive scale. He traded draft picks to land Kyle Kuzma, Kentavia Caldwell Pope, Montrezle Harrell and Russell Westbrook.
Both Kuzma and the KCP were key parts of the 2020 NBA Championship Core. The move was designed to form the Big 3 with Westbrook, LeBron James and Anthony Davis.
The Lakers have built a team of aged veterans around three All-Stars. They signed Dwight Howard, Carmelo Anthony, Rajon Rondo, Wayne Ellington and DeAndre Jordan.
The Lakers were flops so things didn’t pan that way. The franchise missed the playoffs just two years later in the NBA Championship. Head coach Frank Vogel was fired for their terrible season.
The following season, Perinka hired Durbin Hamm as head coach and signed other well-known names like Dennis Schroeder, Ronnie Walker and Thomas Bryant. He also made a deal with Patrick Beverly. Was that enough to change the Lakers’ fortune?
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Naturally, the Lakers continued to struggle in the 2022-23 NBA season. The big problem with the team was Russell Westbrook, who wasn’t on the roster yet.
And the poor performance wasting LeBron James and Anthony Davis’ championship windows put Perinkka’s work in danger.
However, he stopped some big moves that year, landing Louis Hachimura, Jarred Vanderbilt, Malik Beasley and Dangelo Russell, and finally chased Russell Westbrook away.
The new work, combined with Lebron and Ad, was given a bit of a boost from them as the Lakers performed amazing playoff runs all the way from the play-in tournament to the Western Conference Finals.
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The 2023 NBA Champions’ loss to the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals brought hope that Ham could lead the Lakers to a successful championship.
They chose to run it back on the same team, but it proved miserable. The Lakers reached the playoffs quite a bit in 2024, but again came across the Nuggets in the first round and went home in five games.
Finally, Pelinka makes some powerful decisions in the summer, including hiring JJ Redick to replace Darvin Ham and drafting Dalton Knecht on the 17th pick. However, their roster remained the same throughout the offseason.
However, Perinka began operating in the trade market, so it wasn’t long. He traded Dangelo Russell, who had struggled to land Dorian Finney Smith.
However, no one was expecting his next move as Perinka shocked the NBA by landing performer Anthony Davis with one of the league’s best players, Luka Donsic, to pair with LeBron James.
This move not only helped to correct the Lakers’ present, but also gave them a strong future with the potential to build around Don Sic for the next decade.
The stars are beginning to coincide, and one insider says that Luke has revived LeBron. Even the aforementioned Lakers stars like Patrick Beverly have been teasing the team’s past.
They currently sit fourth in the West with a 43-27 record and have plenty of time to go down the path to the second seed.
Once things stand, the Lakers are a real title contender for this season. And it’s largely thanks to the work that Rob Perinka did to fix his mistakes and build this team.