gts1 wrote:Kilroy wrote:I'm not crazy about some of the decisions made since our last championship, but if you think about it, it's only been 6 years, and the championships since then have mostly been devided between LeBron and Duncan... And outside of LeBron and the Spurs Org, there's a pretty steep drop off in talent throughout the league...
Kobe being in steep decline and with there being no legit title contending talent available since then, along with the CBA changes, and I honestly struggle to come up with a combination of events or an orchestrator of those events, that would have left us in too much better of a situation...
Blame the Buss family if it makes you feel better, but I think it would be naive to think that simply swapping Jim Buss for another Pres of BBall Ops is going to result in an instant turnaround... In fact, I'd say the best bet we have to contend has to do with our most recent draft picks, which you'd have to give some credit to the Buss family for. And if any of those guys bust, it won't matter too much who's captain of the ship, it's still not going to be a victory cruise.
there was a price to be paid for winning 5 championships and another two trips to the finals.... The CBA is a main reason climbing out of this hole has taken longer but there were/are other factors too.
In general sooner or later you can't be that successful over that many years without having to pay up sooner or later. They just kept winning and accumulating role playing talent while rebuilding on the fly year after year and that Purple and Gold train kept running down the tracks...The Pau trade really pissed folks off and then CP3...
Honestly I think the CP3 trade goes through and we have a whole other view of the FO but that wasn't going to happen, it was flat out brilliant but the new CBA was designed to stop the Lakers and their ilk, the league wasn't going to allow the Lakers to shoot the new CBA between the eyes that easily
They made that brilliant move, it got rescinded by the league and since then they've been climbing out from behind that 8 ball but they did try... the Nash move up front was more than solid but lady luck threw a wicked curve ball that Nash was never physically able to come back from but that's not the FO fault, freak injury that ended his career for the most part, then Kobe's achilles.. Howard and his whole thing is the only one I had a problem with but it was a rental and you never know, I'd hope a change of scenery would be good for him but as we all know know with Howard scenery has nothing to do with it...
It really was an accumulation of things, much of it out the FO's hands some of it from decisions that looked good up front but hindsight tells us differently others just bad decisions.. Dr Buss had more than his share of those in his time
As for Spero that ship sailed long ago, he had much bigger plans in life than being the Lakers play by play man.. he's got that big fat CBS contract in his pocket doing the NFL which is something he had always had his sights set on, he never wanted to be a one sport one team announcer.. great talent, really will be considered one of the best when his days are done
I have my doubts on this... Reina has a great article about Kobe "the GM" talking about how Kobe always wanted to play with a talented pg but had his greatest success next to Fisher, who isn't a traditional point guard. With Nash, they only worked after Kobe took the ball out of his hands. The trade wasn't a disaster, but I doubt it puts the Lakers in championship contention either.
