The Los Angeles Lakers have been a great story this season, but in spite of rising public opinion, they haven’t been underdogs at any point.
Narratives are a funny thing, especially in sports. You have virtually infinite data points at your disposal, stats and metrics measuring everything you can imagine. There are dates that you can track your findings to, using them as a focal point to determine when things happened. There are multiple industries built on discussing every minute detail, and ultimately facts should be easy to find. And then there are the 2019-20 Los Angeles Lakers.
Perhaps no team is more inundated by narratives than the Lakers. Whether it be Playoff Rondo, Kobe Bryant‘s untimely passing or LeBron James‘s MVP chase in his 17th season, there’s a storyline for everything. Some based in fact, and some based in a belief that narrative trumps all.
The most interesting emerging narrative these days around the Lakers is that they have been underdogs this season, in a campaign where they have perhaps the game’s best player in LeBron James, and clear top 5-10 player in Anthony Davis. While it’s not unusual for a team to consider themselves to be underdogs as a form of self-motivation, it is a bit odd for the leading thought-makers to jump on board as well.
Especially when it’s pretty easily disproven.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we can take a look back at a time when perhaps we were a bit more genuine about the way we saw things. It was a more innocent time, going back to the beginning of the 2019-20 season, a full year or so ago.
Not favorites, but the Los Angeles Lakers aren’t underdogs either
Instead of being underdogs throughout the season, most outlets had the Lakers no worse than the fifth-best chance to win the NBA championship. For example, ESPN’s panel of experts gave the Lakers the fourth-best chance, behind the LA Clippers, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Philadelphia 76ers (it was SUCH an innocent time).
SI.com (whose columnist Chris Mannix wrote the recent assertion that the Lakers are a surprise, out-of-nowhere success story) projected them to have the fifth-best chance at a title behind the Clippers, Bucks, Houston Rockets and the Sixers.
Even FiveThirtyEight gives us a rolling progression of their title chances, using their (admittedly new and unproven) RAPTOR system to show that they began the season around 15 percent to win the championship and for most of the season held steady in that 15-to-25 percent range, which in a wide-open Golden State Warriors-free field is a fairly substantial mark.
The Los Angeles Lakers should be admired for many reasons. Being able to put LeBron James and Anthony Davis on the same roster with a group of players who have done a surprisingly good job of complementing them is a wonderful feat of team-building from Rob Pelinka, their vice president of operations. Handling adversity in its many forms this season has been a credit to head coach Frank Vogel and the veteran leadership this team has assembled.
The Lakers are up 3-1 over the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals and are just one win away from winning a championship in the most complicated, challenging and bizarre season the league has ever seen. There should be nothing taken away from what they’re about to do, and appreciating the accomplishment appropriately needs correct framing.
These Lakers aren’t underdogs, they personify greatness. That doesn’t diminish them, it describes them accurately and it glorifies them for what they’ve achieved.