LeBron James’s Injury Exposes Lakers’ Mind-Boggling Roster Decisions

L.A. finds itself in a similar situation to James’s first season with the team, when the star missed five and a half weeks with a groin injury.

Gary A. Vasquez/USA TODAY Sports

When I saw the latest news about LeBron—that it’s looking like he’ll miss several weeks with a foot injury—the first thing I thought about wasn’t the remainder of this season. Instead, I thought about James’s first season with the Lakers, back in 2018–19.

If you can remember back that far, you’ll recall that the club was made up of James and a number of talented youngsters (Lonzo Ball, Josh Hart, Brandon Ingram and Kyle Kuzma) that’d been mentioned endlessly in potential trade talks for Pelicans superstar Anthony Davis.

Those Lakers showed promise and beat the holiday spirit out of the defending-champion Warriors, featuring Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, on Christmas Day by a whopping 26 points. But the more important takeaway from that day was that Los Angeles—in fourth place at day’s end—lost James for five and a half weeks with a groin injury in what was essentially his first long-term injury as an NBA player.

James’s ailment, when paired with Ball’s, highlighted something that should have been obvious going into that campaign: The team had little margin for error, especially with James being an aging star who might deal with more injuries going forward. It also didn’t help matters that the players mentioned in the trade talks were young and unaccustomed to dealing with rumors. They either needed to be dealt then or told definitively that they wouldn’t be, to clear the air.

Instead, stuff was incredibly awkward. The result: Los Angeles imploded, ultimately going 9–18 without James that year, snapping his run of eight consecutive trips to the NBA Finals.

Fast forward to now, past the 2020 NBA title the Lakers won in the bubble, and some of the same things are still true. James and costar Davis—who became a Laker after the club finally parted with most of those young jewels in ’19—are physically fragile at this stage of their careers. And even with those two healthy, it seemed obvious that the Lakers waited too long to deal Russell Westbrook, who was long seen as the piece holding the roster back from being more complete and versatile on both ends of the floor. (Yes, it’s entirely fair to wonder what the return on him would have been during the offseason, or at earlier stages of this season. But the downside was relying too heavily on the greatness of James or Davis, who can’t be fully relied upon anymore given their recent injury histories.)

In the immediate aftermath of the trades to bring over D’Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt, Malik Beasley, Mo Bamba and Rui Hachimura, the Lakers have shown more athleticism, shooting and hustle. These were the sorts of complementary pieces that always seemed to make sense to maximize James, even if they had come at a greater cost. That was essentially proved in the three games James played following the acquisition of Russell, Vanderbilt and Beasley—all of which turned out to be victories over Western Conference playoff contenders.

We should be clear in saying that James’s foot injury doesn’t necessarily mean these Lakers, at 29–32, are dead in the water from a playoff standpoint. They have one of the NBA’s easier schedules the rest of the way (although so do some of the teams Los Angeles is competing with for a play-in spot), and there’s an argument to be made that this new crew with a fully available Davis will be good enough to make up some ground, even if James is weeks away still. (Davis, too, missed 20 straight games earlier this season, from mid-December to late January.) But it’s certainly far from a given that they’ll make it.

With James having just turned 38 years old, it’s mindboggling that the Lakers didn’t act sooner, with greater urgency in the trade market, if only to stack victories and give themselves more breathing room in case James suffered an injury like this one. It’s a lesson they should have learned from back in 2018–19, when he first joined the club.