Lakers Owner Jeannie Buss Makes Surprising Pick for NBA’s Best Player in 2022–23

She added quite a caveat to it.

Over the past decade, the only thing that has been able to stop Anthony Davis has been his own body. The Lakers star is known as one of the best players in the NBA but injuries have consistently hampered his availability and as a result, his stock when it comes to his ranking among his fellow players has been fairly low for someone of his prowess. 

But Lakers owner Jeannie Buss touched on Davis’s performance this past season and appeared to make an argument for him to be the best player in the NBA. 

“There’s an argument to be made that he [Davis] was the best player in the NBA when he was playing,” Buss told The Athletic. 

“There’s an argument to be made that he [Anthony Davis] was the best player in the NBA when he was playing.”

Do you agree?

Jeanie Buss joined the latest The Athletic NBA Show to discuss more on the Los Angeles Lakers: pic.twitter.com/LiYOsMPH5d

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) September 20, 2023

It’s quite a caveat, but such an argument does have some weight behind it. 

Los Angeles got off to a rough start last season—which prompted Buss to get death threats, she says. But once the team made some significant moves at the trade deadline and got healthy, the Lakers turned it around and made a deep postseason run as the No. 7 seed before getting swept by the Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals. 

In his 56 regular season games last year, Davis averaged 25.9 points and 12.5 rebounds and Los Angeles depended on him just as much in the postseason. The eight-time All Star notched 22.6 points and 14.4 boards per playoff game to boot. 

It might be a long shot, but Davis will get his chance to prove that he can be both healthy and dominant this upcoming season. 

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