The Lakers keep making the same mistakes, but now the stakes are higher than ever for Rob Pelinka

NBA opening night has come and gone with the Los Angeles Lakers as losers. If that sounds familiar, it should. Tuesday was the eighth opening night since LeBron James joined the team in 2018, and the Lakers have won only one of them. Opening-night losses, in and of themselves, are hardly worth panicking over. They're one game out of 82. It just seems notable that we seem to have the same conversations after each of them.

The Lakers don't have enough shooting around their big names. They made just eight of their 32 attempts from deep on Tuesday. In 2022, they shot 10 for 40, followed that up with the worst four-game shooting start in NBA history, and even drew public ire from James himself. "It's not like we're sitting here with a lot of lasers on our team," he grumbled that November. They made just 33% of their 3s when they started 2-5 in 2018, a roster built around Magic Johnson's bizarre ball-handlers over shooters philosophy. A strange choice considering James had just made eight consecutive finals surrounded by 3-and-D players, but considering it's a choice the Lakers have repeated so often over the past eight years, it's apparently one the organization believes in.

The Lakers can't find a center they can trust. Deandre Ayton was all over the place in his Laker debut. His defense was hit-or-miss, he pulled in just six rebounds, he got to the line only once, and his longtime preference for the perimeter over scrapping inside like a big of his size should was well on display. This comes a year after Jaxson Hayes was more or less banished from the playoff rotation despite being the only big on the team, which followed up the failed Christian Wood experiment, which followed up the Wenyen Gabriel-and-Damian Jones "let's find some athletes" season that was a direct response to their failures with the older Dwight Howard and Deandre Jordan a year prior.

The perimeter defense was short a stopper or two. Marcus Smart looked better than he did in two injury-filled Memphis seasons, but not nearly the same as he did at his Defensive Player of the Year peak. He's better-suited defending bigger players. So are most of the Laker perimeter players. Jarred Vanderbilt can't stay on the floor on offense. Jake LaRavia is a valuable team-defender, but ill-suited to guarding high-usage stars. Different versions of these defenders cycle in year after year. Patrick Beverley, Cam Reddish, Kent Bazemore and Trevor Ariza did little to make Laker fans forget about Alex Caruso.

Luka Dončić gets a bitter taste of life without LeBron James in Lakers' season-opening loss to Warriors

Brad Botkin

Again, it's opening night. The Lakers are 0-1, not 0-10. Flaws aside, they're going to be a pretty good team, and getting James back in a few weeks will make them even better. But it's hard not to note to recurring issues here because it certainly seems as though the Lakers are transitioning between eras. James wasn't the star leading the Lakers on Tuesday. Luka Dončić was, and he was spectacular. It doesn't exactly paint the rest of the organization in the best light when you lose a home game despite your star scoring 43 points, pulling in 12 rebounds and dishing out nine assists. Dončić will be a Laker for the foreseeable future. The three-year extension he signed in the offseason assured that.

But we know far less about the players who will be around him, and think of the other game we saw on Tuesday night. The Rockets and Thunder are fully realized juggernauts. They're better, younger and deeper than the Lakers in just about every way. Having Dončić to throw at them is a good start. Toppling them is going to take a whole lot more. And that starts with the right decision-makers putting the team together.

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What's Pelinka's future under new ownership?

Rob Pelinka has, for the better part of the past decade, been untouchable in Los Angeles. How many GMs are allowed to fire three separate head coaches and hire their replacements without their own job security coming into question? Or tear apart a championship team and attempt to correct that mistake by trading for Russell Westbrook? None of it mattered. Pelinka has been an inner-circle Laker. He represented Kobe Bryant. So he's never really been scrutinized internally to the degree he has been externally. 

But the Lakers are in the middle of a sale. While Jeanie Buss will remain the team's governor officially after Mark Walter purchases his majority control of the team, it's hard to imagine he won't have say in who runs the team he's spending billions of dollars to buy. When his Guggenheim group bought the Dodgers in 2012, he replaced general manager Ned Colleti with Andrew Friedman within about two years. What has followed has been the most successful era in team history. The Dodgers could win their third title in six years over the next 10 days.

This is not the sort of owner that's going to be enthused to watch a front office continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. The Dodgers have the systemic advantage of existing in a sport that has no salary cap, but they win as frequently on the margins as they do on blockbusters. They're not just baseball's richest team. They're its smartest. They're not the sort of team that would frequently bet on failed former lottery picks, washed former stars and big names over building a cohesive and complete roster that successfully addresses lingering weaknesses.

That's what the Lakers have been doing since James arrived, and frankly, it's a big reason they wasted so many of his later years. On Tuesday, they wasted a killer Dončić performance. Obviously, nobody in that building wants to waste any more of them. Some of these opening-night crises have proven more significant than others over the years. It's not as though the Lakers always fail over the full 82-game slate. But everyone in Los Angeles should be tired of having these same conversations every October, and if the ones we're having after Tuesday's defeat persist, it's going to put more pressure than ever on the people behind them to fix things before it's too late.