NBA Grapevine

all the leaves are brown
and the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk
on a winter’s day

I’d be safe and warm
if I was in L.A
California Dreamin’
on such a winter’s day

stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I got down on my knees
and I began to pray

you know the preacher likes the cold
he knows I’m gonna stay
California Dreamin’
on such a winter’s day – California Dreamin’ -The Mommas and the Poppas

With the Lakers loss tonight, the Super Team assembled during Mitch Kupchak’s genius off season falls to 1-4.

It’s early in the year, so this is still a very small sample of games. Things could get a lot better, somewhat better, or in a nightmare scenario, not any better at all.

On a team peopled with a Kobe Bryant, a Dwight Howard, a Pau Gasol, one certainly expects some improvement. But how much? In light of present, early events, would a decent year with a playoff loss now become a happy ending?

No, not with the expectations of the dream Super Team heralded before the season. The fact is, this year is championship or bust. Anything less would be failure, and right now, currently, it’s nothing less than disaster.

What will happen down the road? Who knows, though after five games one can’t help but notice some very alarming that are showing up with a frightening consistency.

If this keeps up, or if something less than expectations continue to happen in the next few weeks and months ahead, what will happen? What would be the fallout and how far would it go? Where will the dominos fall? Because one thing is sure, dominos, and heads, will fall. In high pressure, heavy expectations world of big business or sports, when a paradigm that was forecast so strongly falls so far short, heads end up rolling. It’s just the nature of the business.

This is supposed to be the California dream of a Super Team. A noble and good dream. One that would stand in the pantheon of Lakers and NBA greats. And Mitch Kupchak and Jim Buss sacrificed a lot to that dream.

But as we all know, dreams can be funny things. They seem real at first when we have them, when we exist inside them, but as the dream goes on, we notice things. Things that are not right, things that tell us, it’s not real, but a dream. And dreams are very ethereal, ephemeral, unstable things. A pleasant dream that one is enjoying so very much can quickly turn into a nightmare that brings dread.

And if the dream of the California Super Team goes bad, if it shifts from heaven to hell, there will be people made to pay a stiff price for all of us living a nightmare.

The first head, or scape goat, if you will, to fall, will no doubt be Coach Brown. Regardless whether one thinks he’s a good coach, a lousy coach or something in between, he is one who’s head will roll under the lethal axe first.

The reasons are simple. Mitch gave him the Super Team dream and said, “Go get that title guy.” And if he doesn’t get it, he’s gone. If at some point this season, Mitch decides Brown can’t get it, he’s gone.

But when you examine this team, did Brown really get a dream Super Team? Not in my view. The major addition to this team was Dwight Howard. He was the savior, the guy who would bring the heart, hustle and game that his predecessor Andrew Bynum lacked. He would cure Bynum’s ills and also our defensive problems all at once. It’s what Mitch thought, it’s what so many fans thought.

But tonight, once again, Howard had a very good game. A very Andrew Bynum type of game. He was also played to a standstill by Utah’s not so special centers.

I don’t blame Howard for not making the huge impact over Drew that so many predicated and obviously Mitch expected. For one, Howard is not the man here any longer. Now he is part of the Kobe Lakers. Second, he now has to play with a very flawed team, just as Drew did. He has to share space and rebound with and against Pau Gasol, he has to play with a bench that stinks, he has to play with guys who can’t hit outside shots with any consistency, all things he did not have to contend with in Orlando. In other words, Mitch traded a very good center in Bynum, who had to deal with certain difficulties here, for another good center in Howard, who now has to face the same things Drew did. His defense also is not appreciably better than Drew’s. So in essence, so far, the Howard for Drew trade was a lateral one, not a large jump foreword that was the prerequisite for a Lakers championship run. One could almost say Dwight, right now, can be termed Andrew Howard.

Second, Mitch did nothing to secure this team from the horrific bench play of the last few years. Yes, he let some middling players go, then replaced them with other middling players. Why would he expect some major change in production there? Did he sign any bench player that had any fan thinking, Oh man, this guy is really going to jump start the bench? The biggest name was Antwon Jamison, an old man whose best years are in the past. Was this the guy Mitch thought would turn a bare and bereft cupboard into shelves full of tasty food?

And Jamison’s age brings up perhaps the most problematic issue his offseason failed to address: Age.

On a team that was obviously long in the tooth and unathletic, he not only did not fix the issue, but doubled down on the problem. Instead of getting younger and more athletic, he actually made this team older with the additions of a fading Jamison and a bona fide relic named Steve Nash. Which begs a very logical question for any Lakers fan: How do you take a team that is too old and unathletic to win a championship, make it even older, and expect it to get even better than it was the last two years?

That answer didn’t come to my mind back then, and after five games this year, I still don’t see that answer.

Where Mitch should have been trying to move heaven and earth getting rid of old players like Metta, and even aging players like Pau or Blake with younger ones, instead he left that age on the team and added Jamison and Nash, and somehow thought it was a fix?

And what did we give up for all this? Draft pick after draft pick. First round ones. Enough to start a rebuilding process for a team if you have a good front office.

And what did Mitch do to buttress a defense that was so horrible for two years? He signed Howard. A good defensive move. One that you could expect to really help us improve over the last two years….. if our last center was Vlad Divac. But Drew was a pretty good defensive center. And just his size alone down in the blocks intimidated foes, even on the nights he didn’t want to play defense. So how much defensive improvement did he expect here? A ton? So much it would turn this team into a champion?

And what else did Mitch do to improve this massive Achilles heel that ripped the life and championship hopes from this team the last two seasons? Well, he kept an old Metta, he kept Blake and he signed….um…those defensive stalwarts Anton Jamision and that renowned stopper, 38 year old Steve Nash. Given all that, are we that surprised the half court defense and the transition defense looks exactly like last years?

And what if in a total melt down situation, this team doesn’t even make the playoffs? Just suppose, in some apocalyptic season, we were even a lottery team. What would we get for it? Nothing. Courtesy of Mitch Kupchaks wholesale give away of high draft picks to get old men and nothing players.

Today, as watched the Utah game, as I saw Utah’s centers play Andrew Howard to a dead standstill, as I watched again our defense not defend the perimeter or the post, as I watched the same old sad bench get outplayed, for seemingly the millionth time in three years, as I watched the aging Kobe and Metta and Pau and Blake, I heard the Utah announcers say something interesting.

They said, “This Lakers team may not be nearly as good as people thought.”

Gee, why wouldn’t this team be as good as people thought? Our best improvement was barely an improvement over the last player at his position. We did nothing to fix the bench or defense and made an old team older. Why wouldn’t this team be as good as people thought? I have no idea.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter what the media thought or the Lakers fans thought. What was paramount was what Mitch and Jim Buss thought. How they thought not improving the bench would help. How they thought trading one good center for another would give us that over -the -Miami -Heat -edge. How they thought doubling down on age, bringing in over the hill players like Jamison and a true fossil in Nash, and keeping old timers like Metta would somehow solve the age problem on this team.

If this keeps up, the dominos will start to fall. Coach Brown will be the first. That is not speculation but fact. And it may not take much longer. He is the coach and he will answer for the Super Teams failure. For the simple fact that Mitch will not admit doubling down on age was an error, or that trading one good center for another was not some quantum leap forward. In the end, Mitch will not fire himself. He will not blame age, Kobe, Howard, Nash, Metta, Blake, Pau or the bench. In other words, he will not blame the team he put together to win a championship. His finger will turn inexorably to Coach Brown, rightly or wrongly. And Coach Brown will be the first domino to fall if this season continues to fail.

And then what? What if Coach Brown is sacrificed for his shortcomings, real or perceived and a new person takes the helm? And what if under this new coach, things stay the same? What if the older guys look old, if the relics look like statues or keep getting hurt and Andrew Howard keeps manning the pivot with good play that is not much better than Bynum’s? What if the defense still sucks and bench is but a benign puff of breeze the other teams don’t even feel? What if we fail under the new coach? What if at the end of this year, the media and fans say: Boy were we wrong. But more important, what if at the end of the year, it becomes devastatingly clear Mitch was so totally wrong? Because what the media and fans think doesn’t matter a bit. What the GM thinks and does, matters in every regard.

So what if the great California Lakers Super Team dream turns into a black, dark nightmare vision? One that we can’t wake up from, even if we change coaches and systems or even linups? What it turns into a never ending cold, bitter winters day, not a bountifully summer stroll?

So if it does fall apart, how far should the dominos fall? Will they fall past Brown, up to Mitch? Will it also fall downwards to the team and its players? Will the team be fractured, melted down, broken up in total so that next year we won’t recognize it except for some of the few component parts that we know will remain, namely Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard? And what of the savior, Dwight Howard? If things collapse here and it gets ugly, dirty, nasty and mean. If the dream he signed on for, the sweet title run turns into a nightmare of losses and back biting and confusion? Will Dwight decide to re-up or will he decide to take his show to some environ less unstable and volatile?

If these things happen, what should happen to the architects of all this? To Mitch Kupchak and Jim Buss? What should happen to the two men who traded away a kings ransoms worth of draft picks for nothing but faded names, distant memories and the dream of a Super Team that perhaps will prove to have only have been super six years ago? Will they fire themselves or would daddy do it to them? Would daddy Buss call them to the wood shed and say, What on earth did you do to my team? Our present? Our future? Would daddy cut the GM and his sons throat in some sacrifice of pride and penitence?

Or will Jim Buss, that famous neer do well and man of leisure, a man in the comfy position of being the owners son be looking for his own brand of blood sacrifice to cleanse his own so very dirty hands off the Super Team disaster? Will he call Mitch up to his own office and give him that last one-way ride that almost all GM’s eventually take in the wake of a disaster? Would Jim perhaps even welcome that chance to replace the GM with a man of his own choosing, a creature of his own device, moving yet one more step from the massive shadow of his legendary father?

Or in the end, if this all falls on its collective face, will Buss and Kupchak just blush, smile a little, look out upon the shambles of the now and the future and say, “Ooops”, as if they only spilled a glass of milk and keep drawing those huge salaries as though all is well? As though the California Dream was still alive? Will that small, uttered “ooops” be enough to make everyone forget? And should it?

Coach Brown will go. Probably soon. The gears of our current failure are going to grind him out to that resolution. But the question is, when you are handed a dream called a Super Team, with all those expectations from fans, the media and front office, but wake up realizing you have been given Team Geriatric, how much are you to blame and could anyone win a title with it? That’s a question that the next Lakers coach will have to try answer.

But if things don’t turn around under his successor, if we don’t go to into the new coaches dream and encounter something more pleasant In the new collective slumber, how far should the dominos fall and more importantly, how far will they when we all wake up for the final reckoning?