One year after winning the NBA title in the Orlando bubble, the Los Angeles Lakers saw their season end in a first-round loss to the Phoenix Suns.
The 2020-21 Lakers roster had plenty of issues — zero spacing, no reliable shooting, injuries — and general manager Rob Pelinka took an interesting approach to addressing those issues:
He basically signed a 2013 All-Star squad to play basketball in 2021.
The Lakers added Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Trevor Ariza, Wayne Ellington and Kent Bazemore via trades and free agency. They will have at least eight players in their thirties, which isn’t quite how most NBA teams tend to construct rosters. NBA fans spent the past few days roasting the aging Lakers roster, and LeBron James obviously took notice.
On Wednesday, he posted to Twitter with a response to all the jokes before deleting the tweet.
He wrote:
Keep talking about my squad, our personnel ages, the way he plays, he stays injured, we’re past our time in this league, etc etc etc. Do me one favor PLEASE!!!! And I mean PLEASE!!! Keep that same narrative ENERGY when it begins! That’s all I ask.
It’s unclear why LeBron deleted the tweet. That’s not the kind of thing that NBA Twitter is just going to miss. But either way, we’re only in August and the LeBron is all in on the “everyone doubts us” narrative. Cool, cool.
LeBron’s sarcasm aside, we shouldn’t expect the comments about the Lakers’ ages to go away. Even if the roster works, the jokes will be too fun.
