What Is The Ceiling Of The 2023-24 Lakers?

Who does this team want to be?

With just 17 games left in their regular season, your 2023-24 Los Angeles sport a 35-30 record and a very solid top ten (starters D'Angelo Russell, Austin Reaves, LeBron James, Rui Hachimura, Anthony Davis, plus bench pieces Taurean Prince, Jarred Vanderbilt, Cam Reddish, Christian Wood, and probably one of Spencer Dinwiddie or Gabe Vincent depending on health). And yet, they currently occupy the Western Conference's ninth seed, and are no guarantee to survive the play-in tournament.

At the same time in 2022-23, last year's Lakers were 31-34, and were struggling to suss out a top-heavy revised lineup comprising their current starters, though with Vanderbilt starting ahead of Hachimura and Malik Beasley ahead of Austin Reaves (at the time, though Reaves would take over starting duties by the end of the year), plus Hachimura, Reaves, Dennis Schröder, Troy Brown Jr., and Lonnie Walker IV off the bench. 6'9" string bean power forward Wenyen Gabriel was the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency backup center.

That '22-'23 team managed to grind its way through two playoff series wins, before being grounded by the Denver Nuggets in a four-game Western Conference Finals sweep. 

This year's vintage, though a better squad (among incumbents Russell is playing at a totally different level this season, as is Davis, while James seems to have rediscovered his shooting stroke, and Hachimura remains vastly improved from where he was at the same time last season), seems less capable of making a deep postseason run. That's not really anybody's fault, exactly. The Lakers just have a lot of money invested into their two best players, and neither is necessarily a top-15 guy in the league anymore. Meanwhile, the rest of the West has gotten better, specifically the Minnesota Timberwolves (though they're now without Karl-Anthony Towns, Los Angeles Clippers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Phoenix Suns.

So just how high can Los Angeles climb in the postseason?

Can the team replicate its success last year?

LA's defense remains fairly erratic without point-of-attack defenders Vanderbilt or Vincent healthy. The club has also been somewhat inconsistent offensively, though things have improved with the team's newish starting five in place. 

But in its purest form, Los Angeles has the size and scoring to keep up with at least a handful of the top-seeded squads in the West. Oklahoma City and Minnesota look particularly vulnerable, thanks to the Thunder's issues up front and Karl-Anthony Towns' meniscus tear. Denver remains a disastrous matchup for the Lakers. The Clippers, given the extensive injury history of their stars and James Harden's proclivity for choking in the playoffs, aren't much of a concern to yours truly.