The Los Angeles Lakers will enter next season facing an awful lot of questions after failing to even make the play-in tournament in the West in 2022. The biggest of those is whether Russell Westbrook will be able to be a helpful player in Year 2 with the Lakers — provided he’s on the team still, which for now is the expectation — but beyond Westbrook there’s plenty to wonder about when it comes to L.A.’s ability to be a contender again.
Some of that will hinge on how they fill out the roster, but it’s also dependent on a bounceback year from Anthony Davis, who struggled through injuries once again in 2021-22. Injuries weren’t the only issue for Davis, who also regressed as a shooter, something he excelled at in the Bubble when the Lakers won the title and hasn’t replicated since. The questions about Davis’ shot only grew louder this week when a video emerged of him saying he hasn’t shot a basketball since April, which naturally became fodder for questions from fans about whether he was working hard enough on his game — despite there being ample time for him to ramp up on court work before next October.
That debate made its way to First Take where they somewhat oddly debated if Davis could be a “top 7” player in the league, which is one of the strangest arbitrary numbers to pick for such a ranking. When LeBron caught wind of those questioning Davis, he took to Instagram to assert next year Davis will show people once again why he is “Him.”
(@kingjames)On Thursday, Stephen A. Smith offered his response to that, noting that LeBron may not be wrong but that the last time he made a similar offseason proclamation, it didn’t work out so well.
.@stephenasmith finds humor in LeBron’s previous tweets compared to his most recent message.
“He sat up there with all the critics, ‘keep the same energy, keep the same energy,’ right? Well dammit they kept it. And what did the Lakers do? They folded like a cheap tent.” pic.twitter.com/mcuHgqagfZ
— First Take (@FirstTake) June 16, 2022
This is the tweet Stephen A. is referring to that, despite James deleting it, lives on forever in screenshots and the memories of NBA Twitter who will gleefully never let him forget it.
As Stephen A. noted, everyone did and the Lakers were not able to do anything to respond, as the Russell Westbrook experiment failed in ways most critics of the move couldn’t even imagine and injuries once again limited Davis and James himself. I get why James is backing his guy here, but Smith makes a salient point that offseason victory laps about what’s to come aren’t always the best idea and the biggest concern he has isn’t Davis playing well but instead him being on the court consistently enough.