We all have creation myths. Mine features a 26-hour labor, a tired Chinese man about to be a father, and a Good Sam waiting room TV. My dad had been rooting for the purple and gold since he moved to Los Angeles in the late '70s. So after being kicked out of the OR, and with the waiting room TV showing an 18 year-old Kobe Bryant securing a first-round home-court advantage for the Los Angeles Lakers against the New Jersey Nets, he watched the end of the game. And, late the next day I was brought into the world - complete with basketball-sized head. --Okay, maybe Nerf basketball-sized. Of course, a little mythbusting would show that the Lakers had effectively locked up a top four seed already, and that Kobe only played 8 minutes that game. (My head was abnormally large. That part was no myth.) Still, I heard the story at least once growing up, and by the time a preschool onion watched Kobe and Shaq repeat in 2001 and 2002 - I don't remember 2000 - it was too late. Discovering the truth behind the myth years later would not undo my Laker fandom, even if it was unmoored slightly.
...so? Come on, you spent a whole paragraph and you haven't explained why you fucking hate the fucking Lakers. Get to the damn point!
About that. Uh... Strap in.
As an elementary schooler in those early years, I would only watch the first quarter or so before going to bed, so my fandom at that time was watching SportsCenter in the morning before school. Oh fuck, they traded Shaq to the Heat? Who's Lamar Odom? Ronny Who? Holy forking shirt, Kobe dropped 81 points on Toronto last night? But by the time I entered middle school, I was already rebelling. After a Pacific Northwest roadtrip, I started gravitating towards Seattle - the same year the Sonics moved. It seems Dr. Jerry Buss could sense my wanderlust, because that summer the Lakers traded for Pau Gasol. All 10 year-old Jon knew about Gasol then was that he was tall and Spanish, but I could tell the Lakers were all in, and I was ready. I wore my Gasol shirt for every game of that 2008 finals. Were tears shed during Game 6? We may never know. The 2009 Finals was a less exciting series but it was the first title that I felt truly present for, even if I was on top of a mountain in Yosemite waving my mom's Droid around trying to get signal for most of it. And so, the next year I begged my parents to drive home from Yosemite early so we could catch Game 7 against those hated Celtics.
To this day, Game 7 remains a complete blur. There was some amount of yelling and hugging. I probably cried. From that point, there was no going back. Even as I gravitated towards a lanky, sweet-shooting wunderkind on those former Supersonics, even as I rooted for those former Sonics to take down the Evil Empire in Miami, there was no going back. The Lakers, especially those late 2000s championship teams, will forever be a part of me.
But we all grow up, right? When you're eleven and your parents vote for John McCain to stabilize the economy and clean up foreign policy, you don't bat an eye. But then you're in fifth grade, and Barack Obama is the symbol for a changing nation, so you hop on that train instead. By the time you're in middle school, your sight lines have broadened, and you're disillusioned with the promises of 2008 as the administration trumpeting change looks more and more like those before it. For over a decade, I had really only been watching the Lakers. The only time I would watch other teams was in the playoffs or the Final Four. So when my youngest cousin, already a devoted basketball nerd at age nine, would wax poetic about that Steph Curry guy when we visited my dad's family in the bay, my eyes would roll. "Who, glass ankles?"
We all grow up. It just... takes a while sometimes.
But as I entered high school I began developing true, set-in-stone principles - basketball no exception. I began seeing the Lakers through a different lens. Iso-ball with four players standing around watching Kobe take the final shot, delusional fans pitching free-agent passes at every big name imaginable; as someone coming to heavily value team mentality and thoughtful analysis, I began to realize the fucking Lakers were everything that I fucking hated. (There it is.)
So already I was souring on the Lakers as an organization when they made headlines with the Big Three to end all Big Threes. I won't pretend I wasn't excited about Dwight Howard and Steve Nash, but I wasn't through the roof for reasons mentioned in the above paragraph, and my fandom took a big hit when the team stumbled out of the gate, and at the 400m mark, and the 800m mark, and the 1200m mark. With Kobe putting the team on his back to carry them to the playoffs, I was finally getting excited about the Lakers again. We all remember what happened next.
Now, it's not like I had been a diehard Kobe fan my whole life. As a lanky half-Asian kid, I got belittled just for admiring the guy, or for trying to shoot pull-ups in sixth grade pickup games. Plus, every basketball coach I've ever had automatically slotted me in at the five - except the smart one, who played me as a point four for two games in 2007 - so I hadn't gained the same appreciation for shot creation and volume scoring as I had things like hook shots and high post passing. Now you understand the Gasol shirt. Still, seeing Kobe go down like that was a shock to the system. He had been a stalwart my entire life, less a professional athlete than a religious figure. I vividly remember watching him hit those free throws, a pit forming in my stomach realizing that the franchise would never be the same. (My wide-eyed childlike wonder died in 2013 for a multitude of reasons.)
Thus began armageddon. Missing the playoffs had become alien to that team, and it showed. Mike D'Antoni slogged through another season and a half, by which point the most exciting parts of the season for Lakers fans were the draft, where picking in the lottery felt novel, and the playoffs -- where at least we could watch those upstart Lob City Clippers flame out spectacularly before the conference finals.
What was I doing during armageddon, you ask? Well, I was undergoing religious conversion. The scripture of middle school pickup games (and high school, and park pickup), as you'll know, is offense, offense, offense. But despite that, and despite spending most of my evenings with nothing but a ball, a hoop, and the garage wall, my fascination always lay on the other side of the ball. It doesn't matter if you're not the quickest, or if your teammates won't pass you the ball -- if you work hard and move your feet, you can succeed on defense. Even in 7th and 8th grade I was beginning to fall in love with the calculus of help rotations, closeouts, and pick-and-roll defense. So when I saw this rookie from Michigan State doing all of those things at a high level in Mark Jackson's defense, I was sold. (It helped that Steph fixed his ankle issues, and that Klay emerged as the other Splash Brother.) For the first time, I watched every game of a first round series without the Lakers, and when Curry powered the Warriors to wins in Games 2, 3, and 4 against the Nuggets - and hit that turnaround in front of the Denver bench - the conversion was complete. The Lakers were still my #1 team, but after that I truly had a #2. (Bandwagoning the Thunder because they were playing the Heatles doesn't count.) When all three stars came together in 2014 as the Lakers deflated, the writing was on the wall. I was in a new church, likely for good. I still rooted for Kobe of course - just ask any of the fifty people who watched his final game in the Canyon Point A4 lounge - but my #1 and #2 had switched.
And just at the right time. Not because the Warriors became a near-instant juggernaut-- though I won't deny a giddy excitement watching them tear through the playoffs in 2015. With Steve Kerr at the helm, the offense felt like a younger, faster edition of the 2014 Spurs, the most watchable team ever to that point and gateway drug to pure fundamental offensive basketball. And with Draymond coming into his own as a true star alongside Steph and Klay, the defense was my wet dream. Perfectly timed rotations, switching pick and rolls into oblivion, a defense operating as one whole and not five individual parts. Before that season there was still a chance for me to return to being a Laker fan first and foremost. No longer.
Now that we've caught up to the current state of my NBA fandom - basketball fan first, Warriors fan close second, lingering Lakers loyalty third - we can finally talk about, yep, why I fucking hate the fucking Lakers.
>insert anime opening here<
Now, you might notice the timing of this post. It's draft night! A night of celebration. You know who's not celebrating? The Lakers. Lakers fans. Why would that be? Sure, a preseason title favorite lost 49 games, but there should be optimism! For your troubles you get to add the #8 overall pick to a title contender! Except we look at the draft board, and the purple and gold are nowhere to be found. How could this happen?
Well, we'll get to that. But first.
I categorically despise pretty much every move the organization has made since 2012. Why? Because I care about basketball. The Lakers care about ticket revenue, and fan engagement. The late Dr. Jerry Buss cared about those things, but he understood that the #1 priority was always winning. It seems that when he went, the devotion to winning basketball went with him. Dwight Howard and Steve Nash weren't bad decisions, they were just decisions that didn't quite work out. (The last bulwark of my Lakers fandom crumbled when D'Antoni benched Pau for Earl Fucking Clark.) Kobe was a pontoon keeping the Lakers from sinking out of the playoffs, and when his Achilles gave out, the organization finally realized that he was the only one. Byron Scott just wasn't the move for a young developing team (sometimes I dream about the Lakers hiring Mark Jackson in 2014) and that hiring set them back years, because after predictably hiring Luke Walton to coach a rebuild that was doomed from the start, Mitch Kupchak and Jim Buss were sent packing, and it fell to Jeanie Buss to make her first big basketball decision - which person do you tab to build the Lakers of the future? Well, she picked two people, actually. Jeanie decided to make Magic the PBO and face of the front office, while making Rob Pelinka the GM. The next offseason the Lakers landed their Moby Dick: LeBron James. The three of them got along famously, and the Lakers quickly returned to their winning ways, constructing yet another dynasty to stand the test of time.
If you clicked on this then you probably know that's not how it went.
In building the first iteration of the LeLakers, Magic and Rob eschewed the principle rule of building around LeBron (hint: it's shooting) to instead surround him with ballhandling and passing, and also a familiar name in Frank Vogel. They seemed like geniuses for a short time after LeBron went down with a groin injury in December, and seemed like not geniuses for a longer time after the team missed the playoffs while also throwing away 100% of their leverage in a potential Anthony Davis trade. Magic turned over his half of the reins to Rob that offseason, then promptly went on First Take to talk shit about him, sparking an offseason of drama. After mortgaging their entire future, and throwing a couple pick swaps on the pile for good measure, they managed to win a chip, but...
I didn't even care. I mean, it was cool. But I was rooting for Miami. The Heat, after all, are everything the Lakers aren't: principled, basketball-driven, hard-nosed culture from the top down, great underrated coach. While the Lakers were chasing Anthony Davis, the Heat were chasing Jimmy Butler. While the Lakers were trading for Russell Westbrook, the Heat were trading for Kyle Lowry.
Which brings me to the Davis trade. It's not the only reason I hate the Lakers, but it's a fitting microcosm. They blindly chased a superstar name as an escape from improving internally. They squandered all of their leverage for said superstar by tampering. When the price for AD thus grew exorbitantly steep, they mortgaged their future to pay it. Seriously - SEVEN FIRST ROUNDERS! AND ONLY 3 OF THEM HAD ALREADY BEEN DRAFTED! I was biased as a Lonzo fan ever since he asked me for directions outside of Sunset Rec, but even the biggest Lonzo pessimists have to admit that Zo (#2 overall), Brandon Ingram (#2 overall), Josh Hart (#30), #4 in 2019, and #8 in 2022 is a heavy price to pay for an injury-prone superstar contract, even AD entering his prime. AND THAT'S NOT EVEN COUNTING FIRST ROUNDERS IN 2023 AND 2024/25. The result? One literal Mickey Mouse championship, a first-round exit, and a 33-49 season. The only way they salvage this trade is by winning back to back titles the next two years. And as much as I like Darvin Ham, that probably won't happen because the Warriors are back in a big way, and oh yeah... the Westbrook trade.
It was bad. You don't need me to tell you how or why it was bad. But you also didn't need me to tell you that back in August when they made the trade, because it was just an obvious bad trade -- to everyone except the Lakers, apparently. What could they have been thinking?
Tickets. They were thinking about ticket sales. Basketball? Who is she?
Alright, alright. We're like 2500 words into this shit. Isn't this just a list of personnel decisions since 2017? I thought you were going to explain to us why you fucking hate the fucking Lakers?
But you see: that's just it. I fucking hate every fucking move this fucking organization fucking makes, now that I've developed real set-in-stone principles concerning basketball and team-building. Listing everything the Lakers have done since Dr. Jerry Buss passed, or since Kobe retired, is sufficient to explain where I'm coming from. Because, after all,
I fucking hate. The fucking Lakers.
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