After Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles in 2013, the Los Angeles Lakers were soon forced to rebuild, and they started to make good use of their draft picks.
Julius Randle, Brandon Ingram, D’Angelo Russell, Lonzo Ball and Kyle Kuzma, just to name a few players, became Lakers from the start and quickly demonstrated that they had potential.
But shortly after LeBron James joined the team in 2018, it was clear it couldn’t wait on them to develop since James was thought to be entering the tail-end of his career.
Ingram and Ball were traded for Anthony Davis in 2019, a trade that resulted in a championship, and last summer Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Montrezl Harrell, plus a first-round draft pick, were sent to the Washington Wizards for Russell Westbrook.
The latter trade hasn’t worked out, at least not yet.
Lakers Hall of Famer James Worthy went on 97.1 The Ticket, a Detroit radio station, to appear on the “Stoney & Jansen Show.”
While there, he criticized the front office of his former team for its approach to roster construction in recent years.
Via Audacy.com:
“The Lakers, I think they have refused to build over the years,” Worthy said. “We’ve had some good players: (Brandon) Ingram, (Julius) Randle, (Lonzo) Ball. We have tried to win quickly. In Kobe’s last few years, we brought in (Steve) Nash who was a little bit older, Dwight Howard came in with a back injury. We traded away draft picks to try to win immediately and I think they’re going to have really think about how they need to build.
“You look at Memphis, you look at the way Boston is playing right now, you look at the way Milwaukee has built a team over time. We need to create players that have cohesiveness. We had it a couple years ago and we traded it all away to try to win, to try to match what Brooklyn was doing and what other teams were doing with their Big Three players. I think that’s going to go away. That’s an illusion, having the Big Three. You see what happened…
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