The Los Angeles Lakers have aspirations of winning the NBA championship in this 2025-26 season, but Byron Scott isn’t giving them a chance of accomplishing that goal. Scott was asked what the Lakers, who are currently 34-21 on the season, need to do to win the title on a live show of Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast, and bluntly stated they need to pray.
“They ain’t winning no championship this year,” Scott said. “Listen, we all bleed purple and gold, but again, you got to be 100. They ain’t winning no championship this year. They don’t have enough. They don’t have enough. I mean, they got obviously three great players, right? But you need 10. OKC won the championship last year ’cause they were 10 deep.
“And all those guys understood their roles, and they all played hard,” Scott continued. “If you watch a OKC game right now and they win the game, if you watch them doing an interview with Shai [Gilgeous-Alexander], guess what? Almost the whole team is around him… That is us in the ’80s, where everybody wants everybody to do well.
“Everybody don’t care about scoring,” Scott added. “They care about winning. That’s that team in Oklahoma right now. They are so connected as a group, but they’re 10 deep. The Lakers aren’t 10 deep. If they get that this year, they got a chance, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
Scott, who won three titles with the Showtime Lakers in the 1980s, doesn’t believe this current squad is deep enough to win it all. They have three great players in Luka Doncic, LeBron James, and Austin Reaves, but not enough quality around them.
For starters, the Lakers’ center rotation of Deandre Ayton and Jaxson Hayes isn’t good enough. Ayton had impressed at the start of the season, but his stock has plummeted now.
As for the wings and the guards, the Lakers do have some good options there. Rui Hachimura, Luke Kennard, Marcus Smart, and Jake LaRavia are all quality role players. The issue, though, is that the first two aren’t good defenders, while the last two are too inconsistent on offense.
Jarred Vanderbilt is another who struggles offensively, and the Lakers just have too many one-way players. While their offense is still fine because of Doncic, James, and Reaves, the same cannot be said about the defense. They were absolutely woeful on that end for stretches in the first half of the season.
The Lakers had actually shown some improvement defensively before the All-Star break, though, and head coach JJ Redick believed they were trending in the right direction. They then put in quite a poor showing in their first game after the break on Friday.
The Lakers allowed a Los Angeles Clippers team that was on the second night of a back-to-back to shoot 45-82 (54.9%) from the field. This was a Clippers team without Darius Garland that had also lost John Collins to injury in the second quarter.
Kawhi Leonard had left the game with about five minutes remaining in the fourth as well, and the Lakers still found it hard to slow them down. Was this an aberration or a sign of things to come? We’ll see.
Scott isn’t the only one to have written the Lakers off. The Ringer’s Zach Lowe has even dismissed their chances of winning the Western Conference. Lowe thinks the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, and Minnesota Timberwolves are the four real contenders in the West. The Thunder and the Nuggets, in particular, do look a tier above the Lakers.
You shouldn’t completely rule out a team with Doncic and James, but it looks unlikely they’ll be winning it all this time around.
