Los Angeles Lakers: How their 2020 team compares to other recent champions

The competition

The cumulative sum of opponent’s playoff seeds, a stat I definitely didn’t just make up for the sake of writing this article, is when you add the seed number of every opponent a team faced in the playoffs to determine how difficult their path to a championship was. It’s an oversimplification of measuring competition, but the 2020 Lakers were tied with the 2010 Lakers for the easiest path to a championship with a score of 20 (their opponents were an 8, 4,3, and 5 seed respectively).

Again, it’s an oversimplification, but ranking dead last out of 21 teams is worth noting. Interestingly, the 2003 Spurs were tied for the third-easiest path – the similarities continue.

Of course, when looking back through NBA history we don’t judge opponent strength solely based on seed – context matters. For example, the 2018 Warriors beating the fourth-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers led by LeBron James is a lot more impressive than if they would have beat the top-seeded Toronto Raptors led by DeMar DeRozan. No disrespect to the Raptors, but beating a LeBron James led team during a championship run automatically gives it historic validity.

The same goes for beating a dynastic team during a championship run. If, in the past two decades, a team had to go through the Warriors, Spurs, Heat, Celtics, or Lakers, then their championship is bolstered historically because we remember those iconic teams. The recipe for a “difficult” championship this century is that you have to beat a dynasty and/or LeBron James along the way. Those are the rules.

So in that sense, the 2020 Lakers were the victim of a season where none of the traditional powers could stand in the way. The Warriors have been the most iconic team of the last five years but prior to this season they lost their best player and had to deal with injuries that caused them to lose their season.

You could point to the Raptors as defending champions but after Kawhi Leonard left and joined the Clippers they no longer had the feel of a true defending champion. And LeBron James is capable of a lot of things, but he can’t play against himself in the Finals to give it the validity that his presence has given to other teams throughout his career.

No championship is easy, trust that my goal here is not to diminish the impressive playoff run we just saw from the Lakers. But it can’t be disputed that the path to a championship for the 2020 Lakers didn’t go through any iconic opponents or even a top-two seed. That’s not the fault of the Lakers, just the luck of the draw.

That being said, history is still being written, and if the Denver Nuggets or Miami Heat end up making more deep runs in the playoffs with their current core then it’s possible that we could look back on 2020 and consider that the Lakers’ competition didn’t get the credit it deserved.