LeBron James’ impeccable timing saved the Lakers from losing ground in LA

Imagine that LeBron James had not chosen to sign with the LA Lakers in 2018. What would the Lakers be now?

They wouldn’t likely have Anthony Davis, would they? Would Davis have pushed to leave the New Orleans Pelicans for a team in worse position without the LeBron pull? Probably not.

The Lakers probably would have been even worse than they were last season, when they finished 11 games out of the playoffs with LeBron. That wouldn’t have made much of an attractive landing place for any of 2019’s mega free agents, none of which ended up landing in purple and gold anyway. The Lakers had been striking out on marquee free agents for a long time before LeBron bit the hook in 2018. Marquee free agents went elsewhere in 2019, too.

You can argue that Davis was effectively a free agent pick-up since, due to his pending free agency, he could threaten not to sign with any team that traded major assets for him. But the Lakers tried in vain to add a third and got nowhere.

In fact, the targeted third superstar — Kawhi Leonard — chose the other LA team, and convinced Paul George to push to be traded there. Kawhi and PG have long been Lakers fantasies as SoCal natives who played for non-glamour (but highly successful) franchises and were rumored to want to return home. They eventually did, together, and not as Lakers.

If LeBron hadn’t joined the Lakers, and as a result Anthony Davis hadn’t been traded to the Lakers, and no major free agents chose the Lakers in 2018 and 2019, yet the Clippers did remain competitive and in fact a playoff team in 2018-19, and then landed Kawhi as a free agent and traded a bounty for Paul George to become perhaps the leading title contender in the entire league heading into the next few seasons, where would the Lakers be then?

The Lakers have been dwelling in the cellar for more than half a decade now, while the Clippers have been varying levels of competitive. Now the Clippers are quite possibly the league’s premier team. The key here is that the Lakers too will be good — not as good as the Clippers, in all likelihood, due to depth and defense, but competitive.

Imagine if the Clippers were shooting for 60 wins and the Finals while the Lakers were scraping together 32 wins and out of the race by January. If LeBron hadn’t chosen LA in 2018, that could very well have been the situation here. And wouldn’t that have been a major blow to the status of Lakers in Los Angeles for the newest generation of basketball fans, either transplants to SoCal or kids coming of sports fandom age?

It’s irrelevant because of LeBron and then Davis, but it’s worth thinking about. In some ways, we overestimate the ability of lesser rivals to escape the shadows of markets’ apex predators. The Mets will never be the Yankees, the Angels will never be the Dodgers, the A’s can’t surpass the Giants (despite being more competitive lately). The Lakers have a half-century of brilliant success in Los Angeles; the Clippers have about a half-decade of second-tier contenderhood. The scale remains wildly tipped toward the Lakers.

But the Clippers, with their star power and top-tier status now, could have started tipping those scales in their direction, even if just for the new wave of fans who don’t remember when the Clippers were an embarrassment and who weren’t around for the Lakers’ five championships in the first 11 years of this century. LeBron and Davis prevent the superiority tilt toward the Clippers from getting too outrageous, even though the Clips should remain substantially better than the Lakers for the next couple of seasons. The Lakers, at least, won’t be ignored while the Clippers chase rings.

Even if LeBron hadn’t shown up, the Clippers wouldn’t overtake the Lakers as the preferred basketball team of SoCal. That may very never be possible, even if the Clippers run off 50 years of Lakersesque success and the Lakers turn into the Sterling era Clippers (minus the racism and misogyny, Basketball Gods willing). But the risk is lessened given the gift of relevance LeBron has bestowed upon the Lakers.

You’ll note that the New York Knicks, however, did not land LeBron or any star in recent years. And you’ll note that the Brooklyn Nets did add multiple stars, just as the Clippers did. The Knicks are definitely going to remain quite bad, as they have been for most of this century, as the Nets potentially ascend toward becoming a title contender (once Kevin Durant is back). Is New York forever a Knicks town? Maybe. Maybe not.