Los Angeles Lakers: Top 10 moments from 2017-18 NBA season
The Los Angeles Lakers are turning things around after years of turmoil. Here are the top 10 moments from a fun 2017-18 NBA season.
The Los Angeles Lakers broke through this season, leaving behind the stench of the past few seasons and showing the new regime has this team back on track. The entire 2017-18 campaign was filled with surprising victories, talented young players and feel-good stories.
This season, buoyed more by positivity than pessimism, was not a sure thing even one year ago. The malaise of the previous regime and its frequent mistakes were only a few months removed, and the new team of Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka had yet to do more than trade Lou Williams for a middling return.
The uncertainty continued into the offseason, when the shocking celebrity of LaVar Ball threatened to overshadow the season. But slowly the Lakers chipped away at the expectations of failure. A summer trade with Brooklyn moved the contract of Timofey Mozgov, bringing back Brook Lopez and clearing a place for Lonzo Ball to run the offense.
They nailed the draft, and Kyle Kuzma began draining buckets at NBA Summer League — a Summer League the Lakers won in dominating fashion. Then in free agency, the Lakers played things intelligently, saving cap space for the future.
That set up a season where hope was beginning to bloom — not the false hope of fans not willing to grapple with reality, but the true hope of a smart organization rounding the bases of a rebuild.
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That was the foundation of an exciting season for the Los Angeles Lakers, one where they finished just one spot back in the standings from their crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Clippers. While the end result wasn’t a postseason berth — sorry LaVar — it was a 35-game win total that far surpassed the 23-win average the Lakers had displayed the past four seasons. Nine teams finished with worse records than the Lakers, compared to an average of just 2.7 the prior four years.
In a season packed with exciting moments, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Here are the top 10 Moments from the Los Angeles Lakers’ 2017-18 NBA Season. All apologies to our honorable mentions: Lonzo Ball getting into a battle with Nas, the Kyle Kuzma-Lonzo Ball roast-off, Magic Johnson getting another tampering fine, a number of big wins, and of course everything LaVar Ball said ever.
We begin back in November when the champions came to town, where the Los Angeles Lakers announced to the league that they were on the rise once more.