Los Angeles Lakers fans have spent this season grappling with two essential truths, one that’s become evident over the past two months, another that’s lingered over the franchise for years. The first is that the 2026 Los Angeles Lakers are not capable of winning a championship. Despite recent rumblings that the team believes itself better suited to playoff basketball than the regular season, we can and should be realistic about this.
While there’s certainly room for offensive improvement with a healthy Austin Reaves, the Lakers defense ranks 24th in the NBA. You can’t win titles if you can’t get stops. There have been defenses that have ranked reasonably low in defense that have won titles, but those outliers are fairly easy to explain. The 2001 Lakers ranked 22nd in defense, for instance, but that followed a season in which they ranked first. They coasted through the regular season and, unsurprisingly, had the best defense of the 2001 playoffs when they started caring.
Otherwise? While “defense wins championships” is mostly an oversimplification, every champion since those 2001 Lakers has at least ranked in the top half of the league defensively. The Lakers have no path there. Marcus Smart and Jarred Vanderbilt are the only reliable defenders on the team. If you’re willing to accept a simpler argument against the Lakers, it’s February and they have a negative net rating. Does that sound like something you’d say about a champion?
If the Lakers thought of themselves as possible champions, they likely wouldn’t have limited themselves to a single, low-cost deal at one of the busiest trade deadlines in recent memory. Luke Kennard might help.
Lakers trade grades: L.A. gets needed shooting by landing Luke Kennard
Sam Quinn
Kennard is not fixing this porous defense. There’s a reason he could be had for a single second-round pick. It’s not as though the Lakers had much more to work with. That was the last second-round pick they had. During the season, they could only have traded one first-round pick.
This ties into the second of those essential truths: the Lakers do not have an especially creative or strategic front office. They have not effectively managed or collected assets. Aside from Dončić, they’ve given up first-round picks in two trades since winning the 2020 title. One was for Dennis Schröder, who left after a year. The other came in a midseason Russell Westbrook cap dump. Jarred Vanderbilt is the only player remaining from that deal. Speaking of wasted first-round picks, does the name Jalen Hood-Schifino ring any bells? You probably haven’t heard it in a while, or even much when he was on the team. Dalton Knecht seems like a swing and a miss.
Their mid-level exception signings have been a comedy of errors as well. Montrezl Harrell and Lonnie Walker went one-and-done. Kendrick Nunn got hurt, missed a season and was traded as salary fodder in his second year with the Lakers. Gabe Vincent arrived in Los Angeles, never played the level he did in Miami and was shipped to Atlanta this week. Last summer was spent on Jake LaRavia, a solid but unspectacular wing, and DeAndre Ayton, the centerpiece of a defense allowing the third-highest rim field goal percentage in the NBA behind two teams that are tanking, one of whom lost its center for the year after five games.
They have struggled to identify and develop young players for depth, and the ones they have found, aside from Reaves, have tended to slip through their fingers. Alex Caruso is the biggie. Scotty Pippen Jr. and Jay Huff sting quite a bit as they’ve grown into productive role players on dirt-cheap contracts. Jordan Goodwin has become essential in Phoenix. The Lakers waived him over the summer because they couldn’t clear the relative pocket change it would have taken to keep him and sign Marcus Smart with the bi-annual exception.
When they add external talent, it’s usually on the basis of draft pedigree (Cam Reddish, Rui Hachimura, Jaxson Hayes, Malik Monk, Mo Bamba and Ayton were all reasonably young former lottery picks) or prior accomplishments (Smart was a former Defensive Player of the Year who struggled mightily in a two-year Memphis stint, the 2022 team had seven current or former All-Stars in their 30s). In the year since they’ve landed Luka Dončić, they’ve failed to add a single player you’d expect to be a long-term starter alongside him moving forward. If there’s an identifiable plan here, it seems to revolve around hoping to acquire famous people for less than they’re worth.
And, hey, that worked for a lot of NBA history. It worked 12 months ago, when a GM who got fired nine months later handed them Dončić on a silver platter. In the words of Mavs Moneyball’s Kirk Henderson, “the long arc of history bends towards the Lakers.” They’ve gotten away with this for so long that they don’t seem to realize how hopelessly outdated it is. Their last championship in 2020 was won not on organizational competence but because LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Rich Paul chose them as the most comfortable venue for a partnership that would have worked anywhere. But the NBA is smarter than ever. Dončić trade aside, you can’t reasonably expect to just Lakers your way to championships anymore. The best teams in the league are too creative and too methodical for that.
New Lakers owner Mark Walter knows that because he currently owns the smartest team in another sport, the Los Angeles Dodgers. And in a very encouraging piece of reporting for The Athletic, Dan Woike wrote that league sources expect the Lakers to make “significant hires to a wide range of front-office positions this summer,” with the plan being “to model their front office after the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers.”
What exactly this means remains to be seen. Notably, when Walter took over the Dodgers in 2012, he fired incumbent general manager Ned Colletti and replaced him with Andrew Friedman, who has since built a three-time world champion. Whether this means current top basketball executive Rob Pelinka, Jeanie Buss allies Kurt and Linda Rambis, or any other notable existing executives are pushed out is unclear, but if nothing else, significant changes appear to be coming, and if the recent firing of most of the scouting staff was any indication, no one should be considered absolutely safe.
How does this relate to the deadline? Well, you don’t let a substitute teacher write the final exam. If this is a lame duck front office, either in part or in its entirety, then logic suggests you’d preserve your real assets for when the eventual, permanent front office infrastructure is firmly in place. The Lakers had one first-round pick to trade during the season, but could get to three in the offseason. They’re looking at around $50 million in cap space this offseason, but adding any long-term salary at the deadline, like rumored target De’Andre Hunter would have, would have cut significantly into it.
Figuring out how to allocate those resources is a job best left to whoever is making decisions in June and July. Those assets are considerable, but think about the challenge facing whoever is making this decision. Dončić is the only guaranteed long-term starter on this team. Reaves will presumably be back, but the Lakers have to figure out if they can survive defensively with him and Dončić as their backcourt. You need multiple, versatile wing defenders to win a title and the Lakers have none. When Dončić made the Finals in Dallas, he had two high-end rim-runners and rim-protectors. The Lakers have none. The Lakers rank 19th in the NBA in 3-point attempt rate and 3-point percentage. You need shooting to maximize Dončić.
Three first-round picks and $50 million in space sounds like a lot in theory. It dries up quickly when you have to build an entirely new team. Maybe Smart could come back next year, but he’s 31, injury-prone and has a player option. Maybe LaRavia could be a long-term reserve, but he has only one more cheap year left on his contract before he has to get paid again. Maybe Ayton could be a backup. He won’t want to get paid like one. But the majority of whatever the fully-realized Dončić-centric Laker roster isn’t on the team yet.
And letting a front office that may be on its way out the door touch that vital asset pool would have been irresponsible, because again, the 2026 Lakers are not capable of winning a championship. There was no sense in pretending otherwise at the expense of whatever comes next. The Dončić era begins in earnest when these front office changes are made over the summer.
