Los Angeles Lakers: 3 takeaways from the 2018 offseason

3. Lakers taking different approach to challenge Golden State Warriors

My favorite soundbite of the entire NBA offseason was Magic Johnson’s interview at the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with ESPN’s Mark Jones and Chauncey Billups. It’s over 16 minutes long, but I recommend taking the time to watch it and get an understanding of how Magic built this team.

In this interview, he explains his trio (Michael Beasley came after the fact) of one-year signings in Rajon Rondo ($9 million), JaVale McGee ($2.4 million) and Lance Stephenson ($4.4 million) with the intention of building a team to compete with the Golden State Warriors in the postseason.

These signings were labelled as questionable by a great deal of people, highlighting the lack of shooting and interesting mesh of personalities that have battled with LeBron in the past. The shooting cries are overblown regardless, but the best strategy for taking down the Warriors isn’t getting in a track meet. LeBron said it best that you need high IQ players locked in to take down Golden State in a series, and Rondo and Stephenson fit that bill.

Having players that will play physical defense and make the right basketball play is the key to beating the Warriors. We saw the Houston Rockets miss a record 27 straight 3-pointers in Game 7 against them and led to the series slipping through their hands. With the stable of high IQ youth mixed with the playoff tested Rondo and Stephenson, it’s clear Magic is taking the contrarian approach to taking down the back-to-back champs.