EL SEGUNDO — As the Lakers’ season came to a disappointing end with Wednesday night’s Game 5 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves, the sentiment of not having enough time to figure things out after their blockbuster in-season trade for Luka Doncic surrounded the organization.
Not enough time to fast-track the continuity that’s necessary to compete for a championship despite the offensive talent on the roster, led by Doncic, LeBron James and Austin Reaves.
“Any time you make a big acquisition in the middle of the season, it’s always gonna be challenging,” James said during his exit interview late Wednesday night at Crypto.com Arena in the immediate aftermath of the Game 5 loss. “Later in the season, the more and more games we had, I still don’t think we had enough time to mesh.”
Not enough time to fill out the rest of the roster with the requisite skill sets to complement the team’s ball-handlers.
And not enough time for the Lakers’ “Big 3” to form the collective synergy that a team like the Timberwolves, who made it to the Western Conference finals last season, had an advantage in, with Coach JJ Redick admitting that the Lakers simply lost to a better team in Minnesota.
“These things take time, particularly with the star players,” Redick said on Thursday morning during his joint exit interview with President of Basketball Operations Rob Pelinka at the team’s practice facility. “There’s a reason in the modern NBA history, go back the last 30, 40 years, there’s been less than a handful of All-Star players traded in-season that led directly to a championship. These things take time.”
Pelinka added: “When you make a seismic trade at the deadline, your roster and the building around it, it’s kind of like trying to build an airplane in the sky. Now we get a chance to land that plane, put it in the hangar, and really figure out the parts of it that we need to retrofit and change. That’s what we’ll do.”
So as the metaphorical sand in the hourglass ran out on the Lakers’ 2024-25 season with a second straight first-round playoff exit, the organization’s immediate attention and focus shifted to how they can take advantage of the time in front of them to avoid a similar fate next season.
Because as Pelinka said on Thursday, “every year we embark [on] training camp, the journey of a season with the goal of putting another banner up. And any season we don’t do that, we’ve fallen short of our ultimate goal here.”
Which means roster changes are looming.
“We know this offseason, one of our primary goals is going to be to add size in our frontcourt at the center position,” Pelinka said. “That’s going to be part of the equation. We know we have a lot of work to do on the roster, and it will look different next year, for sure.”
The roster was likely going to be retooled, anyway, regardless of Wednesday’s result.
The Lakers have three players expected to become unrestricted free agents. This includes center Jaxson Hayes, who ended the regular season as the team’s starting center after Anthony Davis was traded but saw his role and playing time reduced in the playoffs because of poor performances. Hayes didn’t play at all in Game 5.
James ($52.6 million) and Dorian Finney-Smith ($15.4 million) have player options for 2025-26.
Even though James said on Wednesday night that he has a lot to think about when it comes to his own future, including saying he doesn’t know how much longer he wants to play, Pelinka and Redick spoke with the confidence that James will be back with the Lakers next season.
“The level of confidence in Austin Reaves, LeBron James and Luca Doncic is at an all-time high still,” Pelinka said.
But Pelinka acknowledged the Lakers will be on the lookout for another center. Ideally they find a vertical-spacing lob threat and rim protector – the kinds of players who have thrived playing alongside Doncic in Dallas, like Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford.
The Lakers believed they had found an ideal center when they made a deal with the Charlotte Hornets for 23-year-old, 7-foot big man Mark Williams the day before the trade deadline, but the trade was rescinded after Williams failed his physical with the Lakers.
That left the Lakers playing an assortment of centers after the Williams trade was scuttled, giving more minutes to Hayes, Christian Koloko, and Trey Jemison. They also signed veteran big man Alex Len in February, but they leaned on Hayes, a backup for most of his six-year career, and small-ball lineups for the stretch run of the regular season and did not include Koloko or Jemison on the playoff roster.
The team will also look to solidify its defensive core on the wings and try to make sure they have enough players who can defend the wing position, which Pelinka referred to as an “essential need.”
“We see it playing out in the playoffs,” Pelinka added. “Anytime you can upgrade your defensive core on the perimeter, that’s going to help.”
The focus on the future isn’t to suggest there weren’t positives from the season as a whole.
They won 50 regular-season games and finished as the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference for the first time in an 82-game season since 2010-11.
The trade for the 26-year-old Doncic changed not only the organization’s outlook for its long-term future, but its short-term future and present, too.
“We had some challenges,” James said, “but ultimately having a guy like that is very dynamic for any franchise.”
The hiring of Redick as a first-time coach brought “a complete revival” of energy, work ethic, attention to detail and spirit to the team, as Pelinka put it, with Doncic and James being especially complimentary of Redick during their exit interviews on Wednesday night.
“He’s a hell of a coach,” Doncic said of Redick. “Not many coaches do the stuff he did in his first year, his rookie year. I’m really glad I got coached by him. We have a great bond. It’s been nothing but amazing with him as a coach.”
The Lakers have their franchise “pillars,” as Pelinka referred to them, in Doncic, James and Reaves, with a full offseason and training camp to build roster continuity.
The next few months will be about putting together what they need to take the Lakers further than they’ve been the last couple of seasons – their 2023 conference finals run is the only time they’ve made it out of the first round since they won the 2020 title in the pandemic bubble in Orlando and they are just 2-12 in their past three postseason series.
“Those three guys have incredible promise playing together,” Pelinka said. “And we will collectively do a better job to make sure they’re surrounded with the right pieces to have ultimate success. And we talked at the beginning what ultimate success is here. And we’re gonna put in the work to allow that group of guys to win a championship.”
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