After leaving "unimpressed" after his first visit with the Lakers, LeMarcus Aldridge has given the team a second look according reports. By various accounts, their first "presentation" included too much non-basketball stuff. Second look or not, when the wealthiest team in the league has not been able to sign a notable, much less marquee free agent, in recent history, there's a problem that runs much deeper than their recruiting pitch.
Wednesday night on ESPN, Ramona Shelbourne cut through the noise and observed that the underlying problem for the Lakers isn't salesmanship but an uninspiring roster. For free agents, interested in pursuing deep playoff runs, like Aldridge, the roster doesn't tempt them to sign on. Even more problematic, the Lakers' one star, Kobe Bryant, is now a liability, not an asset. According to this SB Nation piece, Kobe's presence at the first meeting with Aldridge was actually a negative.
How is the presence of one of the top ten players in NBA history and 5 championship rings a negative? Although NBA analysts, especially former players, tend to view players as ageless, even the best eventually succumb to time. Kobe is 36 which is near 65 in basketball years, especially for non-centers, and it's an old 36. Starting at 18 years old, he's played nearly 1300 regular season games and 220 playoff games over 19 seasons. He missed all but six games of the 2013-14 season with a knee injury, followed by his lowest scoring average in 16 seasons (not including the injury) this year. More damning, he shot only 37 percent, a whopping 8 percentage points below his career average. It gets worse. Kobe's cap-hit is a stratospheric $25 million -- the league's highest for now according to Sportstrac.
Kobe represents one of the most problematic scenarios for any team -- how to phase out the superstar. Normally, such players aren't looking to take pay cuts with their longtime team as their skills decline. That's why some teams cut great players loose near the end of their careers. That always seems like a crass, financial move. But, teams that are loyal or overly optimistic in the longevity of their star players frequently find themselves with an ageing player, like Kobe, who is payed a best-player-in-the-league salary but plays like a journeyman. At this point, fans were wishing that the team had been more pragmatic.
The Lakers haven't been to the playoffs in the last two seasons or past the first round in the last three. Since winning the championship in 2009-10, they have not advanced past the second round. That's the inevitable outcome for a team with a declining star.Of course, had the Lakers been able to bring in LeBron, things would be different. Instead, they were able to sign only a very average player like Carlos Boozer, while paying him as if he were a star ($20 million).
Why has Kobe been a buzzkill for sought-after free agents? They can see what the stats show, he's not young, and he's not getting better. He isn't making a team better anymore. He also seems to engender negative feelings, because, well, he's Kobe. His mere presence at the Lakers meeting turned off Aldridge. That's telling. In the same vein, one of the Lakers' first round picks, Larry Nance Jr., tweeted a not-so-nice comment about Kobe's past off-court behavior. While that may say a lot about Nance's immaturity and the lack of self-filters in social media, it also says a lot about views on Kobe.
