Have the Los Angeles Lakers quietly become the second-best team, behind the Golden State Warriors, in the Western Conference?
Roughly a third into the 2018-19 NBA season, the Western Conference is pretty much a mess. The teams that we expected to be sitting atop the conference, next to the Golden State Warriors, aren’t there.
And a few teams that we expected to be bad or mediocre, are the exact opposite. The one constant, despite battling through injuries to start the season have been the Warriors who 19-9, 0.5 games out of the first spot.
By the end of the year, the expectation is that this team will still be the best in the conference. That will likely hold up.
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Apart from that, there really isn’t a team in the West that has stood out. Which leaves me wondering whether the Los Angeles Lakers have quietly become the second-best team in the Western Conference.
The Oklahoma City Thunder have been impressive, at 17-8, but does anyone really trust Paul George and Russell Westbrook when it matters most in the playoffs? This is a team that fell at the hands of the Utah Jazz prematurely in last year’s postseason. Until they prove it on the big stage, there will still be doubts about this team.
The only two other teams ahead of the Lakers in the standings at the moment are their crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Clippers, and Denver Nuggets.
The Nuggets just lost Paul Millsap for the foreseeable future, so who knows if they’ll be able to remain as a top 4 team in the West. He will miss anywhere between a month and a month and a half, and that could put a huge damper in this team’s hot start.
As for the Clippers, well who knows how sustainable this team will be in the second third of the season. The Lakers have the most reliable player, LeBron James, out of all these teams in the mix behind the Warriors.
Assuming that the Houston Rockets continue to struggle to find their footing, they will likely be too far behind to make a run for a top 3 seed in the conference – they are currently 4.5 games behind the Lakers in the standings.
Wait, how did all this happen? Perhaps the Lakers are the second-best team in the Western Conference. Maybe we will be getting a Warriors-Lakers Western Conference Finals matchup this season.