It is not the end times in La La Land, but things appear to stand one Celtics win and a dusting of brimstone away from it. Bitter rivals are frolicking in the front yards of many Lakers faithfuls’ mental abodes. Dan Hurley just dropped a master set of keys to the club like they were molten.
Management is on the case , though it may, in fact, also be the perp it’s looking for . Rinse, repeat, insert a generic Magic Johnson tweet , and you’ve got another batch of late-stage Lakers doom. This fan, for one, kindly requests that somebody, anybody—though my preference is the nepo heiress responsible for as many losing seasons in a decade than in the preceding four combined—please, just make it all stop.
A partial list of Laker self-owns in the past six weeks, all of which manage to tread the line between biblical, bewildering, and buffoonish: In the natural world there’d be buzzards circling overhead. Today, we’ve got r/NBA, FS1’s morning lineup, and a couple of my shamrock-bleeding co-workers. There is a part of this fandom-spanning reaction that is understandable Laker schadenfreude.
There are as many people with reasons to assume the worst about this team as there are those beguiled into assuming something close to the best. (Dream-robbing and star-chasing to the tune of 32 finals appearances and 17 championships will do that.) Another part of this, though, is simply uncut gospel truth: something is broken in the functioning of these recent Lakers, something that.
