This is part one of a six part series reviewing the NBA offseason, taking an individual look at all the title contenders (Lakers, Magic, Spurs, Celtic and Cavaliers) and then the rest of the league as a whole. Because they won the championship, we start with the Los Angeles Lakers.
All the talk surrounding the Los Angeles Lakers following their championship season was whether they could keep two important cogs to their championship formula: free agents Trevor Ariza and Lamar Odom.
What was most surprising is not that they chose to only keep one, but who they chose to keep and who they got to replace the departing. They chose to keep Lamar Odom instead of Ariza (who departed to Houston) and replace Ariza with the colorful Ron Artest (departing Houston).
Here’s where the decision-making looks to be uneven. If you want to choose Lamar Odom over Ariza, I get it. The financials of today’s NBA, especially with the salary cap shrinking like David Ortiz’s power numbers, just make it really difficult to keep all your guys and take a huge luxury tax hit. On the court, though I have never been the biggest of Odom fans, his length and comparative athleticism paired with Pau Gasol on the frontline, not to forget the potential frontline of Odom, Gasol and Andrew Bynum is scary to say the least. It’s very difficult to defend, especially with the offensive polish Gasol and Odom both have. They can create their own shot and be playmakers for others. And though Odom is six years older than Ariza, he was always the barometer of whether the Lakers would win or not. His ability to dominate the glass at times, particularly at the offensive end and the three point shot he discovered at some point in the playoffs really helped to drive the Lakers to the title. And while he isn’t as athletic as Ariza, play as good defense or have the signature playoff moments that Ariza did (though I still and will always blame George Karl for this. How can you, in the Western Conference Finals, be beat by two of the simplest plays in basketball by not having an adequate inbounds play and having Kenyon Martin and Anthony Carter pass it in, especially when you have a good passer and true playmaker in Chauncey Billups. There was plenty of time on the clock, you didn’t need to pass it in and have Chauncey shoot it, so he could have easily passed it in and got it back and run a play. Absolutely bewildering but I digress.), his ability to play and defend multiple positions make his upside to the Lakers winning another championship in the near future more likely. When he’s on, his impact on the game is more than Ariza’s probably could be.
Where it gets confusing is why they would trade Trevor Ariza, who is on the upswing of his career for Ron Artest, who is on the downswing. Contrary to popular belief, Artest is not the defensive player he once was. He’s lost a lot of athleticism and cannot stay in front of anyone with any kind of quickness. He can body up bigger, slower guys like Paul Pierce but other than that, he will struggle. When the Rockets played the Lakers in the Western Semis last year, Shane Battier did the best job anyone has done on Kobe. Kobe was forced to take contested jumper after contested jumper and while he is Kobe, and going to make that more often than a Dwight Howard free-throw, it is all you can ask him to do. When Battier needed a break, Artest would take over and Kobe would go to the rim over and over and over again. Meanwhile, Ariza was defending dynamic scorers like Carmelo and if you watched game 5 and 6 of the Nuggets-Lakers series, you would see that he does that pretty well.
Offensively though is where the trade loses me. In the playoffs last year, Ariza developed into tremendous 3-point shooter, where he shot 47% from three. In the playoffs last year, Artest developed into the ultimate me-first guy, Houston’s version of Monta Ellis, becoming a virtual black hole on offense: if the ball touched his hand, it was never going to be seen again. He jacked up bad shot after bad shot, fading from three, turning it over, anything he could to be a detriment to his team. In game 7, 80% of the time he was the worst player on the floor, disrupting any kind of flow on offense, floating to the three-point line at every opportunity and refusing to get down low and post up Luke Walton (why did I just describe Rasheed Wallace circa 2007). Not only that, I don’t know how he’ll fit into a supplementary role. Kobe, Gasol, Odom and maybe Bynum are all guys who will get offense before him. That’s never happened to him. How will he react to almost never having plays run for him? Ariza was fine with this because he never needed to dominate the ball to be effective on offense. You could swing it to him off a Gasol double team and he could drain the angle three with lethal effectiveness. And with his athleticism, he could finish a fast break than Artest can at his stage of his career.
Then there’s that knucklehead factor that just can’t be ignored. Though I know Kobe and Phil Jackson is a strong pair, Artest just seems like a different breed of human. He may be a good teammate and good guy to be around, I don’t know because I’ve never been around, but it seems like time and again, he just does crazy stuff. Just all around, there’s a lot of risk and not a lot of reward for the same money that they could have gotten Ariza for.
Other than that, it was a pretty quiet offseason for the Lakers. They kept Shannon Brown, which is a good move. He’s athletic, has developed a nice jumper and defends well (now if they could only play him instead of Sasha Vujacic who has been mistake prone and ineffective since this). I would have liked to see them try to get a point guard of the future because even though Derek Fisher made the two biggest shots of the playoffs, there were many points in the playoffs where he didn’t look like he should be a starting point guard for much longer. They do have Jordan Farmar and I like him as a player but I don’t know if you can win a championship with him or not. But considering point guards weren’t out there to be had (you can’t win a championship with Ramon Sessions) there’s no need to bash them there.
With the moves that they made, the Lakers didn’t seem to have a real direction. While Odom keeps them in that top tier because the potential impact he can have on games, trading Ariza for Artest brings them back to the pack a little bit, especially considering some of the moves other teams made.
Grade: C+
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