LeBron James passed two milestones this week, one of them historic, the other less so. On Tuesday night, James broke the most hallowed record in basketball, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s mark of 38,387 career points. This is, of course, a staggering achievement, made all the more impressive by the fact that the 38-year-old James is still playing at an astonishingly high level and could easily go on to put this record comically out of reach. (James is currently averaging 30.2 points, 8.5 rebounds, and 7 assists per game, all numbers that are above his career averages.)
The second milestone was far more quotidian. At 3 p.m. on Thursday, the NBA’s trade deadline passed. Prior to its expiration, the Los Angeles Lakers, who at the time of this writing are mired in 13th place in the Western Conference with a record of 25–30, shipped out guard Russell Westbrook and a lightly protected 2027 first-round draft pick for point guard D’Angelo Russell, wing Malik Beasley, and forward Jarred Vanderbilt. The team made some other moves around the edges as well, such as sending out guard Patrick Beverley for center Mo Bamba, but the exchange of Russells is the headliner. D’Angelo Russell is a polarizing player—most Minnesota Timberwolves fans I know were not exactly heartbroken to see their team move on from him—but he’s the sort of guard who has tended to thrive alongside LeBron, a good (if streaky) shooter who’s capable of playing both on and off the ball.
These moves improve the Lakers, but it’s unclear by how much. Enough to raise them from 13th to 10th, earning them a spot in the league’s play-in tournament? That’s certainly possible. Is it enough to pull them out of the play-in mix and into the conference’s top six? Probably not. Is it enough to win a first-round playoff series? Hey, it’s your FanDuel account.
In the deadline’s aftermath, the Lakers’ transactions feel more like the proverbial shuffling of deck chairs than a meaningful repair job. Compounding this was the incendiary Western Conference arms race unfolding at the same time as the Lakers’ acquisitions. On Sunday, the Dallas Mavericks traded for guard Kyrie Irving, a former teammate of James’ in Cleveland. Prior to the Dallas trade, LeBron made no secret of his desire for the Lakers to acquire Irving, then made no secret of his frustration when they failed to do so. Then, late Wednesday night, mere hours after L.A.’s Russell trade was announced, the Phoenix Suns acquired superstar forward Kevin Durant, instantly vaulting themselves into the top tier of title contenders.
Since he arrived in L.A. as a free agent in the summer of 2018, LeBron’s time with the Lakers has been a mixed bag. The high point was the 2020 championship that the Lakers won in the Orlando “bubble,” the fourth ring of LeBron’s career and the 17th title in franchise history. Most Lakers fans would probably argue that winning that title makes everything else that’s gone on worth it, and they are probably right. Unfortunately, “everything else that’s gone on” has mostly been a mix of underachievement and varying levels of catastrophe. The Lakers missed the playoffs in 2019, busted out of the first round in 2021, and missed the playoffs again last year. This year they are once again on the outside looking in against a Western Conference field that, within the past week, has improved significantly.
The troubles have left James trying and failing to keep his team’s head above .500, while simultaneously jockeying for position on lottery picks the Lakers owe to the New Orleans Pelicans. This is no way for LeBron James to spend his twilight years. Because of a contract extension that he signed last summer, LeBron was ineligible to be traded during this season. But once summer rolls around, King James should ask out of L.A., and the Lakers should grant his wish. The LeBron-Lakers marriage is no longer working for either party, and watching one of the greatest players in history finish out his career exchanging passive-aggressive shots with the front office of his play-in-or-bust team is too depressing a proposition for NBA fans to endure.
LeBron himself bears no small amount of responsibility for the current state of the Lakers. James and his agency, Klutch Sports, have had an active hand in shaping the Lakers’ roster since his arrival. LeBron pushed for the team to unload a massive haul of young players and draft picks for All-Star forward Anthony Davis, who, since the 2020 championship run, has been beset by recurring injury issues. (Davis has played in only 107 of a possible 209 games since the start of the 2020–21 season.) LeBron also pushed for the Lakers to acquire Westbrook during the 2021 offseason, a move that almost immediately proved to be disastrous.
And yet letting a star player dictate personnel moves to such an extent is symptomatic of the lack of organizational direction that has plagued the team since the latter years of Kobe Bryant’s prime. The Lakers were a mess long before LeBron showed up, largely because of the very mix of impatience, vanity, and grass-is-greener star fixation that has brought them to their present predicament. Since the 2012–13 season, the Lakers have won a total of four playoff series, all of which came in the 2020 championship run. In other words, in 9 of the past 10 seasons, the Lakers have failed to make it out of the first round of the playoffs, and in seven of those seasons, they have missed the playoffs entirely. That’s not very good, especially for an organization that fancies itself one of the league’s premier franchises.
The dysfunctional episodes are too many to list, but some greatest hits: There was the disastrous acquisition of Dwight Howard and Steve Nash in 2012, a move that was supposed to bring more championships but instead blew up, as Nash was past his prime and Howard chafed at Bryant’s leadership style. Starting in 2015, the team began a lottery-mired stretch in which they managed to secure the draft’s second overall pick three years in a row, picks they spent on D’Angelo Russell, Brandon Ingram, and Lonzo Ball. Russell was shipped to Brooklyn in 2017 as part of a trade for center Brook Lopez (but not before snitching out a teammate’s infidelity), and now returns at the cost of yet another first-round pick. Ingram and Ball were sent out as part of the deal for Davis. (Ingram has blossomed into an All-Star with New Orleans, while Ball is an excellent if somewhat unusual player who has been beset with disconcerting knee problems; the Lakers drafted him one spot higher than Boston Celtics superstar Jayson Tatum.)
Those are just the basketball foibles; behind the scenes the team operates like one of the houses on Game of Thrones, a constant churn of insiders and outsiders, of strangely powerful informal advisers and favor-currying sycophants. The team is owned by the children of the late Jerry Buss. (Buss was recently the subject of another HBO show, this one much worse than Game of Thrones.) The Buss progeny are known to squabble. In 2017, Jeanie, the current controlling owner, effectively ousted her brother Jim from his position as executive vice president of basketball operations in order to install Laker legend Magic Johnson in the role; Johnson then memorably announced his resignation to a media scrum in 2019. Johnson was replaced by Rob Pelinka, whom Magic later publicly accused of “backstabbing” him. Prior to taking over the Lakers, Pelinka was best known as the longtime agent of Kobe Bryant.
LeBron James isn’t without his flaws, and it’s not as though every, uh, decision that he’s made throughout his career has been perfectly executed. But by and large, he’s a remarkably likable athlete, especially considering just how much scrutiny he’s been under since he was a teenager. He generally seems like a good guy, a doting father, generous teammate, and affable if corny personality. He deserves a better situation than this one, a team with young and exciting players that will ease his transition into whatever is next. For the Lakers’ part, they could use an exit ramp, too: As of right now, the team’s draft picks are depleted, Davis’ next injury seems more a matter of “when” than “if,” and LeBron—despite his still-elite performance and stats—finally seems past the long era of his prime when he can generate deep playoff runs sheerly off the force of will.
When LeBron broke Kareem’s record, it was during the third quarter of a home game that the Lakers would go on to lose by 2 points to the Oklahoma City Thunder, a bad team with a bunch of cool young players, the likes of which Lakers fans would probably kill for. With the additions of Russell, et al., the Lakers probably could have beaten the Thunder. But is being able to beat the Thunder really what LeBron, or the Lakers, should be about? It’s time to ransom the King.
