Truly the start of a new era.
Kyle Koster | Feb 3, 2025
In this story:
- Los Angeles Lakers
The unbelievable Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis deal turned the NBA world upside down with a single Shams Charania scoop and while everyone tries to figure out what it all means, one thing is immediately clear. Overnight the approaches of the Dallas Mavericks and Los Angeles Lakers changed drastically. For the Mavs it's now about betting big on defense and conditioning. For the Lakers it's figuring out how to maximize putting Doncic on the same team as LeBron James and all that goes with such an endeavor.
James is, at worse, the second-best basketball player to step on a court. But even though he's still impressively productive at age 40, he is not 25 years-old like Doncic. Instantly Luka became a bigger part of the Lakers' long-term future than the person who has been steering the ship there for years and has perhaps unmatched power.
So, simply put, the Lakers became Doncic's team, as ESPN's Brian Windhorst put it on Get Up.
"The big thing that just happened is every year of LeBron's career, 21-plus seasons, everything that the teams have done when he's on it has been about him," Windhorst said. "That is no longer the case. Everything the Lakers will do going forward will be about No. 77. They are now Luka Doncic's team.
"Seeing how the Lakers address their roster because the roster is now messed up, they don't have any big men and whether they make moves for this LeBron era, this year and maybe next or if they make moves for the next three to five years will tell us a lot about what they're thinking."
It sounds strange to say out loud, yet Windhorst is right. It's kind of jarring that James would move away from the center of a team's universe in a split-second after being the point everything revolved around since entering the league. It's something that would have happened years ago for a player of even slightly lower prowess. And to be totally fair, it's not as though he'll become an afterthought mere months after his team drafted his son to play along him so it's a distinction without much of a difference.