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      Lakers Pass N.B.A. Trade Deadline Unchanged and Uncertain

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      For a team still searching for cohesion around LeBron James and Anthony Davis, the buyout market may not be enough to vault into title contention.The Los Angeles Lakers were not in a great place ahead of the N.B.A. trade deadline on Thursday. They had disgruntled stars, a losing record and a general air of dysfunction a couple of months before the playoffs were scheduled to start.The bad news? Nothing changed once the trade deadline passed. Same disgruntled stars. Same losing record. Same general air of dysfunction.As some stiff winds of change swept through the N.B.A. on Thursday, the Lakers continued hobbling forward as constructed, which does not bode well for their future. It is an indictment of a franchise that still employs LeBron James and Anthony Davis, two stars who are part of a hodgepodge cast of aging and ill-fitting pieces.Exhibit A: Russell Westbrook, whose inconsistent play at age 33 has landed him on the bench in crunchtime situations. If the Lakers were looking to trade him this week, there was an obvious problem: Who would take him and his contract? He is making $44 million this season, with a player option worth $47 million next season.In a post-deadline conference call with the team’s beat writers, Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka did not offer specific details but said he was “aggressive in a lot of conversations trying to improve this team.” Nothing panned out.As for Westbrook’s future?“Russ is a big-hearted individual. He wants to win,” Pelinka said. “And he knows that with players as impactful and influential as Anthony and LeBron are, it’s going to require sacrifices in his game and how he plays.”On Wednesday night, Westbrook sat out the Lakers’ loss to the Portland Trail Blazers with what the team described as a stiff back. Afterward, Lakers Coach Frank Vogel said Westbrook had been engaged with his teammates on the bench. That might have been the only bright spot for the Lakers, who are 26-30 ahead of their game against Golden State on Saturday.“I do know this has been an extremely difficult and challenging season for all of us,” Vogel said, “so there is a toll.”Those words preceded a dizzying trade deadline for a whole bunch of teams not named the Lakers. At the top of that list: The Nets agreed to send James Harden to the 76ers as part of a deal for Ben Simmons, Seth Curry and Andre Drummond. Other big names were on the move, including Kristaps Porzingis, whom the Dallas Mavericks traded to the Washington Wizards for Spencer Dinwiddie. The Boston Celtics beefed up their backcourt by trading for Derrick White. The Charlotte Hornets acquired Montrezl Harrell from Washington for a late-season push.While the Lakers could still be active in the buyout market, it seems impossible to envision a way in which they could reinvent themselves as a realistic championship contender. They were limited at the trade deadline after having already sacrificed so many assets, including future draft picks, in their deals for Davis and Westbrook.On Wednesday night, the eve of the trade deadline, James said he was tired.“I just want to get some wine and get up tomorrow,” said James, who helped deliver a championship to the Lakers just two seasons ago. “I feel good about what tomorrow has in store, and we’ll see what happens.”He added: “But other than that, I’m kind of just focused on what we can do to be better.”It is a long list. Entering Thursday, the Lakers ranked 17th in defensive rating, 22nd in offensive rating and 26th in turnovers. Westbrook has committed 224 turnovers this season, more than any other player in the league.Russell Westbrook leads the N.B.A. in turnovers.Gary A. Vasquez/USA Today Sports, via ReutersIt was only August when the Lakers acquired him from the Wizards in exchange for Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Harrell and draft picks. While James seemed to acknowledge his role in recruiting Westbrook to the Lakers — “It was exciting helping put this team together this summer,” James said before the start of the season — Westbrook seemed thrilled about returning to Los Angeles, where he grew up and played in college at U.C.L.A. He went so far as to call it a “blessing.”It was not difficult, though, to anticipate problems before the experiment began. The Lakers, with the oldest roster in the league, were built to compete for championships — eight years ago. In fairness, James said it would be a process to form chemistry. (It would not, he famously said, be “peanut butter and jelly” right away.) But a process usually leads to some form of improvement, and the Lakers, if anything, have regressed recently, having lost six of their last eight games.James and Davis have been limited because of knee injuries — Davis missed a huge chunk of the season, and there are broader concerns about the state of James’s 37-year-old body — but Westbrook is a shadow of the player who won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Award with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2017.In 55 games with the Lakers, Westbrook is averaging 18.3 points per game — the fewest he has averaged since his second season in the league in 2009-10 — while shooting 43.5 percent from the field and just 29.8 percent from 3-point range.At the same time, he has started to gripe about his diminished role.“You never know when you’re coming in, you never know when you’re coming out,” he said this week.On Wednesday, James compared the trade deadline to being in a fog.“We’re all trying to see what’s on the other side of it,” he said.On Thursday, the fog dissipated. 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      Lakers Search for Answers, With and Without LeBron James

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      James could miss multiple games because of coronavirus protocols, but the Lakers have struggled even when he has played.Before the start of the N.B.A. season, LeBron James acknowledged one of the hard realities facing the Los Angeles Lakers. The team had once again rebuilt its roster in pursuit of a championship, and James said he knew that forming chemistry would be a process, that nothing would come easily — at least not right away. James illustrated his point by making an analogy.“I don’t think it’s going to be like peanut butter and jelly to start the season,” he said in September.James seemed to be carefully managing expectations rather than hyping them up after the Lakers acquired Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony and several other aging stars. The Lakers had the potential for boom or bust as one of the league’s most curious experiments.Sure enough, a quarter of the way through the season, they are not exactly making sandwiches.The latest obstacle for the Lakers surfaced on Tuesday when the team said that James had entered the N.B.A.’s coronavirus health and safety protocols, which apply to players who have tested positive or potentially been exposed to someone who has. The Lakers declined to comment when asked whether James had tested positive for the virus, but after the team defeated the Sacramento Kings on Tuesday night without James, the Lakers’ Anthony Davis made comments that could suggest that he had.“Scary situation,” Davis told reporters. “He’s said he’s good. I think he’s asymptomatic, which is a good sign. We want to make sure that he gets back. Health is most important. It’s bigger than basketball.”James, 36, who said before the season that he had been vaccinated against Covid-19, could be forced to sit out for at least 10 days unless he is able to return two negative tests 24 hours apart, according to league guidelines. The Lakers have a relatively light schedule over the next week and a half, which means that James could miss a total of four games if he is absent for the full 10 days.Typically, players who are vaccinated face less stringent requirements than unvaccinated players. After Thanksgiving, though, the N.B.A. implemented enhanced testing requirements even for vaccinated players, according to documents sent by league officials to each of the 30 teams. They did so with the expectation that the holiday would increase players’ potential exposure to the virus.The league, which has said that 97 percent of its players have been vaccinated, has also been urging eligible players to get booster shots as breakthrough cases create disruptions and additional health concerns. On Tuesday, Lakers Coach Frank Vogel said James’s health was the top priority.“We just want the best for him right now,” Vogel said. “That’s where our thoughts are. We have a next man up mind-set. It’s an 82-game season. You got to deal with guys being in and out of the lineup. We’ve been without him some already this season.”It has not been a seamless season for James, who, largely because of injuries, has missed more than half of the team’s games, or for Los Angeles, which improved its middle-of-the-pack record to 12-11 with Tuesday’s 117-92 win over Sacramento.One of the big questions for the Lakers entering the season was their durability, and it was unavoidable because the Lakers are, by average age, the oldest team in the league.At the center of it all is James, who will turn 37 on Dec. 30. For so many years, he operated as a seemingly indestructible force. Seldom injured, he almost never missed games — until he joined the Lakers in 2018. He has since labored with injuries, and a sprained ankle hindered him as the Phoenix Suns bounced the Lakers from the first round of last season’s playoffs.Russell Westbrook averaged 25.7 points, 8.3 rebounds and 8.5 assists over the past six games, a streak in which he never scored fewer than 20 points.Kyle Terada/USA TODAY SportsThis season, James has been sidelined for 10 games because of ankle and abdominal injuries, and he also missed a game because of a suspension. When active, he has been solid and occasionally brilliant, averaging 25.8 points while shooting 48.4 percent from the field, numbers that are not far off his career averages. His production is remarkable considering he is the fourth-oldest player in the league.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 5The Omicron variant. More

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      Lakers’ Opener Shows Its Stars Are Not Yet Aligned

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      A team that remade its roster around big names finds that getting them all on the same page is still a work in progress.LOS ANGELES — Anthony Davis still remembers the narrative that trailed him to Los Angeles: “Can he do it under the bright lights?”Davis had been a stat-stuffing star with the New Orleans Pelicans before forcing his way out, landing with the Lakers in a trade before the start of the 2019-20 season. His first game was against the Clippers, who limited him to a subpar effort in a Lakers loss. Afterward, Davis was beating himself up at his locker. LeBron James, who was sitting next to him, advised him to calm down.“You’re fine,” James told him. “This is Game 1.”And then James promptly went back to laughing at whatever he was looking at on his phone.It was an exchange that stuck with Davis, who wound up playing well enough that season to help deliver the Lakers’ first championship in 10 years. And it was one that Davis fondly remembered on Tuesday night after the Lakers’ season-opening loss to the Golden State Warriors. Something about it felt familiar to him.A new teammate, Russell Westbrook, had assembled a forgettable performance in his debut for the Lakers — 8 points in 35 frustrating minutes — that prompted James, with Davis’s help this time, to offer another post-Game 1 pep talk.“We’re with him,” Davis said of Westbrook. “It’s his job to continue to be himself, and we’re going to help him through all the little avenues and these challenges along the way.”James said he told Westbrook to go home and watch a comedy.“Do something that can put a smile on his face,” James said. “He’s so hard on himself.”The Lakers have emphasized star power over youth as they have rebuilt their roster.Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressOne game does not mean a whole lot when there are 81 left to play. For the Lakers, their grand experiment — so many aging stars, only one basketball — will resume on Friday against the Phoenix Suns, who eliminated the Lakers from the playoffs last season. In the wake of that first-round exit, the Lakers used the summer to surround James and Davis with a fascinating cast of characters, including Westbrook, the winner of the 2017 Most Valuable Player Award and a triple-double factory in his heyday.Now 32, Westbrook is as polarizing as ever. Can he produce without having the ball in his hands most of the time? Can he find his jump shot? Will he help the Lakers, or ultimately hurt them?Again, the Lakers’ 121-114 loss to the Warriors was merely the first game of many. But it was a clunker for Westbrook, who finished with 8 points, five rebounds and four assists while shooting 4 of 13 from the field. In the 35 minutes he was on the court, the Lakers were outscored by 23 points. He also had four turnovers and a technical foul.His news conference was brief and fairly monosyllabic.What did it mean to him that James and Davis had given him some encouragement in the locker room? “We talked,” Westbrook said.What did he make of the ambience at Staples Center? “I would say I wasn’t paying much mind to be honest,” he said.OK, how about it being his first game for the Lakers, his hometown team? “Nothing different than a normal game day,” he said.You get the idea. The spotlight will only burn brighter from here — on the Lakers, on Westbrook, and on their decision to trade for him this summer instead of working out a deal with the Sacramento Kings for Buddy Hield, a shooting guard who would seem a better fit to play off the ball with the likes of James and Davis.“Him more than anybody, it’s going to be an adjustment period,” Coach Frank Vogel said of Westbrook. “He’s coming into our culture, our system. He’s the new guy, and he’s got to find his way.”Vogel cited the team’s patchwork preseason in explaining away some of Westbrook’s hiccups. Nobody played that many minutes together. Westbrook’s numbers in four games — 35 percent shooting, a team-high 23 turnovers — would have been more alarming if the preseason actually meant anything.For his part, James said he suspected that Westbrook had succumbed to “first-game jitters” as a player who had watched the Lakers growing up.“And now you’re putting on a Laker uniform and you’re stepping into Staples Center,” James said. “I can only imagine how many friends and family have contacted him over the last 48 hours.”The real referendum on Westbrook’s viability will play out over the coming weeks, though there are larger questions about how this Lakers team was assembled. In recent seasons, they have essentially gutted their roster of the young players they had drafted and were working to develop — everyone from Brandon Ingram to Kentavious Caldwell-Pope — in favor of acquiring older, splashier players.Jordan Poole had 20 points for the Warriors.Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressGolden State provided a useful counterpoint to the Lakers’ approach on Tuesday by showcasing Jordan Poole, a third-year guard who scored 16 of his 20 points in the second half and helped make up for Stephen Curry’s poor shooting night. Klay Thompson, who is expected to return to the Warriors’ lineup in a couple of months after missing the past two seasons with injuries, watched from the bench.Worth noting: All three of those players are Golden State draft picks. The Warriors continue to build from within while the Lakers go shopping every summer.It was not all bad news for the Lakers. James and Davis were as dynamic as ever, combining for 67 points. But they could have used some help.“I’ve got to figure it out,” Westbrook said. More

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      LeBron James and Stephen Curry Test Different Paths Back to N.B.A. Peak

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      James’s Los Angeles Lakers revamped their roster in a bid for another championship. For Golden State and Curry, familiar faces were just fine.LOS ANGELES — On the cusp of his 19th N.B.A. season, Carmelo Anthony belongs to a new team but harbors the same ambitions: winning his first championship. In that regard, he is not alone on the Los Angeles Lakers, a collection of veterans who will form one of the league’s most curious experiments.“We have too much experience on this team to think anything other than we’ll figure it out,” Anthony said. “But it all takes time.”After a winless preseason, the Lakers will get going in an official capacity on Tuesday night, when they play their season opener against the Golden State Warriors, a franchise that has recently gone about its business in a decidedly different way.While the Lakers have been a tear-down project — LeBron James, who signed with the team in 2018, is the longest-tenured player on the roster — Golden State has been busy remodeling while keeping intact the essential core from its not-so-distant championship era, all in the hope of staging a resurrection with the help of some new pieces.Two teams. Two approaches. And an early-season, but much-anticipated, litmus test at Staples Center on the viability of each.“I think we’ll be ready,” Anthony said. “You can feel it.”Russell Westbrook, at 32, adds a scoring punch to a team with several old-for-the-N.B.A. veterans.Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressThe Warriors — remember them? — are running it back with Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and, eventually, Klay Thompson, whom the team expects to return by late December or early January after he missed the past two seasons with injuries. Thompson tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in the 2019 finals, then ruptured his right Achilles’ tendon last November.“It doesn’t work without Klay,” Curry said in an interview last week. “So there’s definitely anticipation. And we feel like we’ll have three seasons in one this year: this first chapter until he gets back, reintegrating him into the fold, and then the playoff chase down the stretch. So there’s a lot to look forward to.”Without Thompson — and largely without Curry, who broke his hand and missed all but five games — Golden State hibernated through the 2019-20 season, finishing with the worst record in the league. Last season, as the team continued to groom prospects like Jordan Poole, a first-round draft pick in 2019, and Juan Toscano-Anderson, who came out of the G League, the Warriors went 39-33.Now Golden State is nearly whole. And the team has welcomed the reappearance of a familiar figure: Andre Iguodala, a key cog in the team’s five straight trips to the finals, from 2015 to 2019, which produced three championships.“We built something special here,” said Iguodala, who has rejoined Golden State after spending most of the past two seasons with the Miami Heat.While Iguodala was gone, Golden State experienced its share of turbulence. But the franchise maintained a sense of stability. Curry and Green were still around. Thompson would be back at some point. And Steve Kerr, now entering his eighth season as the team’s coach, was at the helm. The pieces were there. It would just take some time for them all to coalesce again.“Our expectations are definitely higher this year than they have been the last couple of years,” said Kerr, whose team went 5-0 in the preseason. “It’s a really fun group to coach.”The Lakers will be playing under an even brighter spotlight after overhauling their roster (again) this summer. They signed Anthony, traded for Russell Westbrook and acquired veterans like Kent Bazemore, DeAndre Jordan, Dwight Howard and Rajon Rondo while jettisoning the bulk of their personnel from last season. Gone are many of the role players from their championship run in 2020: Kyle Kuzma, Alex Caruso, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.The Lakers are not big on continuity, demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice draft picks and young players for name-brand stars of a certain vintage. If there is urgency, it stems in large part from the fact that James is 36 and has struggled with injuries in recent years. No athlete can operate at the height of his powers forever, not even James. And so the Lakers have gone about mortgaging their future in pursuit of another championship now — if they can create chemistry in short order while avoiding more health problems.“I think our basketball I.Q., our talent and our skill will, for the most part, get us there,” Anthony said, “and then, the cohesiveness of being together and playing together will take us over the top. We understand where we want to be and where we’re going to be, but we’re not there yet.”Draymond Green, right, provided a critical defensive complement to the offense of Stephen Curry, left, during Golden State’s championship runs.John Hefti/Associated PressThe team has acknowledged that it will be a work in progress. As James put it before the start of training camp, “I don’t think it’s going to be like peanut butter and jelly to start the season.”Any mention of preseason basketball ought to come with the disclaimer that the games are fairly meaningless. But the Lakers did go 0-6, which was enough to raise some important questions: Is this a hodgepodge roster? Can a team this old withstand the rigors of an 82-game regular season? And, perhaps most important, can Westbrook and James, two ball-dominant players, coexist in a productive way?Frank Vogel, the team’s coach, said he had no such concerns.“There’s definitely a willingness for those guys to share and sacrifice,” he said, adding, “It’s tough to get 15-plus-year vets to be completely serious about the preseason.”For his part, James said Monday that he had fully recovered from the ankle injury that slowed him toward the end of last season — “I didn’t do much basketball for the first two months of the summer,” he said — and that he was ready for a fresh start, one that will come against an opponent that, unlike the Lakers, hopes to reach into its past. More

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      LeBron James Laughs at Your ‘Old’ Lakers Memes. After His Nap.

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      The Los Angeles Lakers have five players who are at least 35 years old, including the 36-year-old James. Older, wiser, championship?LeBron James has seen the memes and read the punch lines.“The narrative about our age,” he said, “I kind of laugh at it. I actually do really laugh. I’m not just saying that.”The Los Angeles Lakers are old. They are the N.B.A.’s Traveling Wilburys, an aging rock star collective hoping to produce one more chart-topping album. Dwight Howard and DeAndre Jordan have more mileage between them than a 2003 Honda Civic. Carmelo Anthony, 37, recalled first getting to know James, 36, when they were high school standouts — way back in the previous millennium. At 32, Russell Westbrook is comparatively spry.It all could make for an all-encompassing disaster. Or it could be an extraordinary success. But the Lakers will not be boring.“I don’t think it’s going to be like peanut butter and jelly to start the season,” James told reporters on Tuesday ahead of training camp. “But that’s all part of the process.”As change swirls around him, James remains the franchise’s central force. On the cusp of his 19th N.B.A. season and his fourth with the Lakers, he has had an eventful tenure in Los Angeles. Year 1: an injury-marred season for James that the Lakers punctuated with a losing record. Year 2: the death of Kobe Bryant, followed by a championship run in the league’s pandemic-era bubble. Year 3: more injuries and a first-round playoff exit.Ahead of Year 4, James donned a hard hat as the Lakers underwent a hefty renovation. Only James, Anthony Davis and Talen Horton-Tucker remain from last season, though a couple of familiar faces — Howard and Rajon Rondo, both 35 — are back after helping the Lakers win a title two seasons ago.“It was exciting helping put this team together this summer,” said James, who might as well have a front office role.In his own small way, James reinvented himself, too, by slightly slimming down at this august stage of his career.“He’s made the decision to come back a little bit leaner,” Rob Pelinka, the team’s general manager, said last week. “And I think that’s going to translate in his explosiveness and his quickness.”Pelinka said he had outlined three objectives ahead of the draft and free agency: Add playmakers, find more shooting and, finally, shift back to employing two defensive-minded centers to both augment Davis’s presence in the post and remove some of the physical demands on him. Pelinka wound up raiding a warehouse of vintage All-Stars.“A lot of times when you put a group of players together — a group of talent like we have — it doesn’t work out,” said Anthony, who spent last season with the Portland Trail Blazers. “But I think where we’re at in our careers and understanding what we have to do, understanding the sacrifices that we all have to make in order for us to work, that’s the beauty of the actual journey that we’re about to go on.”Russell Westbrook, who is from the Los Angeles area and played at U.C.L.A., was traded to the Lakers from the Wizards in August.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressCarmelo Anthony spent the past two seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers before joining the Lakers this summer.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated PressWestbrook, a former winner of the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award, spent last season with the Washington Wizards before he was traded to the Lakers in August. Westbrook called it a “blessing” to be playing in Los Angeles, where he grew up. James said he and Westbrook had been “tied at the hip” since the summer.“I think it’s because we both understand and know what it takes in order to win, and obviously LeBron knows what it takes to get to that next level,” Westbrook said.To that end, the Lakers have already managed to avoid a potential distraction dogging several other teams, including the Nets and the Golden State Warriors: Pelinka said the Lakers would be fully vaccinated by the time they open their season against Golden State on Oct. 19.“I know that I was very skeptical about it all,” James said. “But after doing my research and things of that nature, I felt like it was best suited for not only me but for my family and my friends, and that’s why I decided to do it.”At the same time, James said he would not his use his public platform to urge others to be vaccinated.“I don’t feel like for me personally that I should get involved in what other people should do for their bodies,” he said.It was not a topic that James seemed to relish, though the spotlight will presumably settle on the Lakers’ wild on-court chemistry experiment soon enough. And there will be a feeling of urgency for everyone involved.There is not much of a clear future for the Lakers, at least not in the painstaking let’s-make-sure-we-plan-beyond-this-season sense. In acquiring the likes of Davis in 2019 and Westbrook this year, the Lakers have traded away several promising players and an armada of first-round draft picks. The idea has been to win now, no matter the cost.But the aging process is undefeated, and there are obvious concerns about the Lakers’ durability. James, so indestructible for much of his career, has been hampered by injuries in recent years, and Davis limped through the team’s abridged playoff appearance last season. For his part, Pelinka sought to downplay the suggestion that the Lakers were brittle by citing the example of Tom Brady, who, at 44, is still quarterbacking football teams to Super Bowls.Amid the doubts and the questions about the Lakers, Anthony can make out a path that leads to a championship ring, which would be his first. There were moments in his career, he said, when he considered the possibility of teaming up with James, one of his closest friends. The opportunity never materialized. Perhaps neither player was ready for that to happen, Anthony said.“But here we are now,” he said. “Timing is everything.” More

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      Westbrook Always Plays With Stars. But Will They Align on the Lakers?

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      Russell Westbrook has played with the N.B.A.’s best, with limited success. Here’s what that says about him, and what it could mean in Los Angeles.Russell Westbrook is coming off one of his best seasons, having posted a career high in rebounds and another in assists that was enough to lead the N.B.A. And for the fourth time in five seasons, he averaged the vaunted triple-double, typically defined as reaching double-digit numbers in points, rebounds and assists. Before Westbrook, it seemed almost impossible to average a triple-double once, much less multiple times.But those numbers weren’t good enough to land him on the All-Star team last season, the first time the 32-year-old hadn’t been selected since 2014. It was in part because his Washington Wizards were not very good. But the Wizards’ barely making the playoffs was a perfect microcosm of the general debate about Westbrook’s legacy: It’s not a sure thing that Westbrook’s style of play is conducive to winning basketball, even with his gaudy numbers.And now Westbrook is with the Los Angeles Lakers, traded for the third time in three years. Former Most Valuable Player Award winners like Westbrook typically do not play for four different teams in successive seasons while still putting up numbers comparable to when they won the honor.Westbrook will again have superstar teammates, this time LeBron James and Anthony Davis on an unequivocally so-called superteam. On paper, this new iteration of stars assembled to chase a championship should easily compete with teams like the Milwaukee Bucks, the reigning champions, and the Nets, both of whom have star trios of their own.Westbrook is a less efficient shooter than Kyle Kuzma, right, one of the players he was traded for.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressThis will most likely be the best chance Westbrook has had to win a championship.These Lakers are better than the Oklahoma City Thunder team Westbrook helped take to the finals in 2012 alongside a young Kevin Durant and James Harden, where the three M.V.P.s-to-be were outmatched against the James-led Miami Heat superteam. These Lakers are more talented than the 2017-18 Thunder team with Carmelo Anthony and Paul George, which bowed out in the first round of the playoffs. When Westbrook reunited with Harden — now a bona fide star — in Houston in 2019-20, James’s Lakers easily dispatched them in the postseason’s second round. And it goes without saying that the current Lakers team is better than last season’s Wizards, even though Westbrook was playing with Bradley Beal, one of the league’s best scorers.Westbrook has not lacked for star teammates, but he has lacked the success that is expected to come with having them, and that may be an indictment of his style of play: high-volume scoring, weak shooting and elite rebounding that is devalued in favor of shooting. Some of this is also an indictment of the rosters Westbrook has played with. The 2017-18 Thunder team had an ill-fitting Anthony, who had difficulty adjusting to a lesser role. In Houston, the Rockets traded away center Clint Capela and opted to play small ball, which had limited effectiveness. In Washington, the Wizards dealt with injuries to key players, like Rui Hachimura and Thomas Bryant, and were hampered by a coronavirus outbreak.But if Westbrook can’t figure out how to win next to James and Davis, who won a championship with some of the players the Lakers traded for Westbrook, it will be a blow to Westbrook’s legacy.The Wizards lost in the first round of the playoffs last season.Bill Streicher/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAfter Durant left the Thunder in 2016, Westbrook became the focal point, and the Thunder were eliminated from the playoffs in the first round for three straight years.A large part of the issue with Westbrook is that he has been an inefficient scorer for much of his career. His career true shooting percentage — which accounts for free throws and 3-pointers — is 52.8 percent, whereas the league average is around 55 percent. And he takes up a lot of possessions to score his points as a result.His defense has also been suspect.This is where his joining James and Davis makes for a fascinating, and potentially treacherous, situation. Two of the players the Lakers traded for Westbrook — Kyle Kuzma and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope — were helpful defensively and with floor spacing. That meant they didn’t need the ball in their hands to make their presence felt on the floor. Kuzma shot 36.1 percent from 3 last season, while Caldwell-Pope was at 41 percent. Westbrook’s career average from 3 is 30.5 percent. A data point helpful to Westbrook: Kuzma shot only 31.6 percent from 3 in the Lakers’ championship year.The fit with Westbrook, James and Davis will be a mad experiment. Westbrook needs the ball in his hands to be effective, while James usually runs his team’s offense. James’s best teams have been loaded with shooters to toss the ball to when he drives into the paint. Davis is one of the most offensively skilled big men but, like Westbrook, inconsistent from 3, at 31.2 percent for his career. Even James is a career 34.5 percent shooter from deep — around average.This means the Lakers will presumably start three players who aren’t the most reliable shooters in today’s N.B.A., which is so dependent on efficient offense generated by spacing. The Lakers have some counters with their other additions: Kent Bazemore, Anthony and Wayne Ellington — all of whom shot better than 40 percent from 3 last season.Westbrook’s addition to the Lakers makes this one of the most intriguing roster constructions in the last decade.Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports, via ReutersWestbrook’s career usage rate — how often he uses possessions — is 32.51 percent, second to only Michael Jordan in N.B.A. history. James is fifth at 31.55 percent. If Westbrook is using more possessions than James next season, something has gone terribly wrong. For the Lakers to be at their best, Westbrook is going to have to take a back seat, and some players — think Allen Iverson — don’t adjust well to that, because their skills and ego don’t allow them to.Players have steadily complimented Westbrook as a teammate. But does he know that he will have to watch the ball a lot more than he’s used to? With the Wizards last season, according to the league’s tracking numbers, Westbrook’s usage percentage with Beal on the floor was about 26 percent, compared with 33.9 percent when Beal was off. For Beal, his rate was at about 29.8 percent with Westbrook on, and 38.2 with him off. But the Wizards didn’t have a third player of Davis’s caliber.Westbrook will be helpful if he plays to his strengths. He is a relentless slasher and because of his ball-handling and penetration, he will create easier shots for James and Davis. He also pushes the fast break. The Lakers were 21st in pace last season, making them one of the slowest teams, while Westbrook’s Wizards were the fastest. Westbrook plays every possession as if he is trying to outrun a vengeful lightning bolt, and that’s if he’s not the lightning bolt himself. That will help the Lakers add a new dimension to their offense: Westbrook and James are among the best fast-break players the league has seen.Westbrook’s days of averaging a triple-double are most likely behind him. Davis and James are exceptional rebounders and playmakers, leaving less for Westbrook to put on his plate, at least statistically. But Westbrook’s addition to the Lakers, as well as that of Dwight Howard and Anthony, makes this one of the most intriguing roster constructions in the last decade.But if Westbrook is unable to jell with his latest batch of star teammates, the Lakers may end up being an ill-fitting, must-watch mess. More

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      Lakers’ Russell Westbrook Deal Shifts Power Back to Los Angeles

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      Westbrook, 32, averaged a triple-double last season and should help the Lakers rebound from their first-round exit from the playoffs.As the N.B.A. braces for the start of free agency negotiations on Monday, a pending blockbuster trade that would send Russell Westbrook to the Los Angeles Lakers is already in the running to be this summer’s most impactful transaction. More

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      Ugly N.B.A. Fan Behavior Is Back With Popcorn Toss and Spitting Incident

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      Inappropriate behavior by fans toward Washington’s Russell Westbrook and Atlanta’s Trae Young has highlighted a pitfall in the return to packed arenas for the playoffs.After months of basketballs echoing in nearly empty venues because of the coronavirus pandemic, Barclays Center is rocking, Madison Square Garden is electric and fans packing into N.B.A. arenas across the country are adding a dimension of excitement to playoff games that was sorely lacking in last postseason’s bubble.But the easing of restrictions, which has allowed fans to return in droves, has brought to the forefront another dimension that the pandemic had covered: the sometimes ugly behavior of unruly fans in proximity to players and players’ families.On Wednesday night alone: A fan in Philadelphia poured popcorn on the head of Washington Wizards guard Russell Westbrook as he departed the court at Wells Fargo Center with an ankle injury. In New York, a fan spat on Atlanta Hawks guard Trae Young at Madison Square Garden. In Utah, three fans were ejected from Vivint Arena. The fans had directed comments at the family of Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant, according to a person with knowledge of the details who was not authorized to publicly discuss them.Morant later responded to a tweet about the Jazz ejecting and indefinitely barring the fans, saying, “as they should.” His family, he added, should be able to cheer for him and his team without being verbally abused.“There are certain things that cross the line,” Westbrook told reporters after his game in Philadelphia. “In these arenas, you got to start protecting the players. We’ll see what the N.B.A. does.”The fans from Wednesday’s incidents have all been barred indefinitely from those arenas, and the 76ers announced that the popcorn-throwing fan, who was ejected, would have his season tickets revoked. But the punishments and subsequent apologies from teams will likely do little to alleviate growing concern among the players that fan behavior has grown unseemly, with players having little option but to take the abuse.“We apologize to Trae and the entire Atlanta Hawks organization for this fan’s behavior,” the Knicks said in a statement. “This was completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated in our venue. We have turned the information over to the appropriate authorities.”Young has quickly drawn the scorn of Knicks fans at the Garden during the first two games of their first-round series. Fans raucously cursed at him during Game 1 on Sunday, which the Hawks won largely because of Young. He put a finger over his mouth afterward to signal his silencing of a Garden crowd that had waited since 2013 to see the Knicks play N.B.A. playoff basketball.Throughout Wednesday’s game, fans again serenaded him with an expletive and mocked his hair. Young tweeted a video of the spitting incident on Thursday, asking the rapper 50 Cent, who sat on the sideline between Young and the fan, if he was OK.“We saw video of that, and unfortunately, I think we’re just living in a society where really people just don’t have respect anymore,” Hawks Coach Nate McMillan said. “In no way should that be allowed or should that happen at a sporting event or really any event where you are coming to watch a game and you do something like that.”Russell Westbrook of the Washington Wizards was headed to the locker room after an injury when a fan poured popcorn on him.Matt Slocum/Associated PressPlayers across the league voiced frustration over the incidents. “By the way WE AS THE PLAYERS wanna see who threw that popcorn on Russ while he was leaving the game tonight with a injury!!” Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James tweeted. “There’s cameras all over arenas so there’s no excuse!”The players’ union released a statement on Thursday, putting the first word, “true,” in bold and in italics for emphasis: “True fans of this game honor and respect the dignity of our players. No true fan would seek to harm them or violate their personal space. Those who do have no place in our arenas.”The union added that bad fan behavior would be “appropriately evaluated by law enforcement just as if it occurred on a public street.”In February, security ejected fans from their courtside seats after they argued with James in Atlanta, when the Hawks were one of only nine N.B.A. franchises allowing fans in attendance.“I’m happy fans are back in the building,” James told reporters after the incident. “I missed that interaction. I need that interaction. We as players need that interaction. I don’t feel like it was warranted to be kicked out.”He added, “They could’ve probably kept it going and the game wouldn’t have been about the game anymore, so the referees did what they had to do.”The unruly fan behavior is not limited to the N.B.A. Baseball stadiums have hosted a number of fights between fans since beginning its season this spring.Samuel R. Sommers, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University and an expert on the psychology of fans, said that sports bring people together in both unifying and combative ways.“Take your pick, whether we’re talking a return to normalcy or whether we’re talking about people getting the pent-up energy out of their system,” Sommers said. “Things like this happen when you get groups of people like this together and when you add the excitement, the adrenaline, the energy of sports.”This week’s episodes resurfaced a trend of troubling fan interactions at N.B.A. arenas that the pandemic had paused. In 2019, the N.B.A. toughened its fan conduct code after lobbying from players amid high-profile incidents, including the Toronto Raptors’ Kyle Lowry being shoved by Mark Stevens, a Golden State Warriors minority owner, during a finals game.Players like Westbrook and Young have largely showed restraint when receiving vitriol from fans.“Obviously I’m doing something right if you hate me that much,” said Young, who cursed back at fans after his playoff debut against the Knicks. “At the end of the day, we’ll get the last laugh if we do that.”Westbrook said that he had learned to look the other way during most cases but that the situation was worsening. Three years ago, the Jazz barred a fan in Utah for, the team said, “excessive and derogatory verbal abuse directed at a player.” Westbrook, who is Black, said that fan, who appeared to be white, made “disrespectful” and “racial” comments.Three fans were ejected in Utah after a “verbal altercation” with the family of Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant, center.Alex Goodlett/Getty ImagesThe Jazz on Thursday said they had also indefinitely barred the fans from Wednesday’s incident involving Morant’s family. “The Utah Jazz have zero tolerance for offensive or disruptive behavior,” the team said in a statement, adding, “We apologize to all who were impacted by this unfortunate incident and condemn unacceptable fan behavior.”Morant’s father, Tee, who is Black, told ESPN that one of the fans made a “sexually explicit remark to his wife.” Another, he said, told him, “I’ll put a nickel in your back and watch you dance, boy.”This week, Nets guard Kyrie Irving, in comments to reporters, appeared to be trying to pre-empt any personal or racial attacks before playing against his former team, the Boston Celtics, in Game 3 of their series at TD Garden on Friday.Black athletes from different sports have long described being taunted with racial attacks in Boston. Torii Hunter, a former M.L.B. outfielder, told ESPN that he had a no-trade clause to the Red Sox written into his contract because of the racial slurs he heard when he played in Boston.“I am just looking forward to competing with my teammates,” Irving said, “and hopefully, we can just keep it strictly basketball; there’s no belligerence or racism going on — subtle racism.”On Thursday, Celtics guard Marcus Smart told reporters that he’d heard the types of comments in Boston that Irving was referring to.“I’ve heard a couple of them,” he said. “It’s kind of sad and sickening, because even though it’s an opposing team, we have guys on your home team that you’re saying these racial slurs and you expect us to go out here and play for you. It’s tough.”The N.B.A., in a statement on Thursday, said that its fan code of conduct would be “vigorously enforced.”“The return of more N.B.A. fans to our arenas has brought great excitement and energy to the start of the playoffs, but it is critical that we all show respect for players, officials and our fellow fans,” the N.B.A. said.Marc Stein More