How LA Rebounded From Miserable Start To Season

There was some hope coming into the 2022-2023 season for your Los Angeles Lakers. After a horrendous 2021-2022 run, people thought there was no way things could get any worse than they were, and then this season started and looked worse than last season. 

LA started the season 2-10 and showed little to no signs of life or hope for Laker fans. The Lakers looked terrible, and even when they showed flashes of a good team, deep down, people knew this wasn't sustainable. 

Changes were necessary, and they were made by this year's trade deadline, by which point the team had offloaded creaky past-their-prime point guards Russell Westbrook, Patrick Beverley and Kendrick Nunn, plus decent backup center Thomas Bryant, to add D'Angelo Russell, Jarred Vanderbilt, Malik Beasley, Rui Hachimura and Mo Bamba. 

Since then, LA has looked like a new team because they were new, but they looked like a good team trending towards a great team. LA went 18-9 since the trade deadline and finished four games above .500. It's crazy looking back and seeing how far this team has come, and superstar LeBron James feels the same way. 

“I was just telling A.D., I was like, ‘Man, can you believe that we’re going to finish this season above 500?’” James said. “After everything that’s went on this season, we turned this thing around. And it’s regular season, obviously, and there’s more basketball to be played, but to know that we’re going to finish a few games above .500, this is pretty cool.”

Yeah, LA has the superstars in James and Anthony Davis, but this still came as a surprise. Health played a massive factor for the superstar duo, as they missed 55 games combined. Another big thing was that the pieces, before the trade deadline, around the duo were not a great fit.