The Los Angeles Lakers are up at fifth in the West with a 33-21 record, but LeBron James isn’t sure what they are capable of achieving in this 2025-26 NBA season. James was asked in his press conference before Sunday’s All-Star Game about what the Lakers could accomplish in the second half of the campaign if they stay healthy.
“I mean, it’s hard to say because this is a new group,” James said. “We added [Deandre Ayton] and Marcus [Smart] and Jake [LaRavia], and we just got a new acquisition on our ball club a couple games ago. So it’s too hard to really say what we’re capable of. I know that when we’ve played some of our best basketball this season, we’ve looked very good.
“On the other side, when we’ve been terrible, we’ve looked disgusting,” James continued. “So, I think the most important is like if we can get healthy, how many minutes we can be on the floor, how much chemistry we can build with the sprint starting. You will hope that you can have the regular season to kind of build that cohesiveness and things of that nature. But I’m hoping that if we can get healthy, that we can start to build that.”
Of the Lakers’ 21 losses this season, 18 have been by double digits, and eight by 20 or more points. As James, who is averaging 22.0 points, 5.8 rebounds, 7.1 assists, 1.1 steals, and 0.6 blocks per game in 2025-26, said, when they play poorly, they do look atrocious.
As for the 33 wins, the Lakers haven’t always looked great in them, but there is one area they excel at: the clutch. They have an excellent 15-3 record in clutch games this season. The Lakers’ 83.3% win rate in them is the best in the league by a fair bit. If you’re in a close game with them in the fourth quarter, there is a good chance that you’ll lose.
A lot of the credit for the Lakers’ success in the clutch goes to the likes of James, Luka Doncic, and Austin Reaves. They have delivered down the stretch time and time again, but we haven’t seen them together a lot.
James, Doncic, and Reaves have played just 10 games together due to injuries. Lakers head coach JJ Redick is pleased that his team is 12 games above .500, considering how much time they’ve missed. If you’d told someone at the start of this season that they’d have this record at the break and these three would have barely played together, they’d have laughed in your face. Redick and the players deserve a lot of credit.
While James isn’t quite sure how far this team can go, Doncic is confident the Lakers will be a very dangerous team. The Slovenian was excited about the three big guns getting to play together after the break, and it will be interesting to see how much better this group looks when there is more continuity in terms of lineups and rotations.
The Lakers were actually 33-21 after 54 games last season as well and finished 50-32. They’d be hoping to better that record this time around and go on a deep playoff run. The Lakers didn’t do a whole lot to improve their chances of that at the trade deadline, though. They only brought in Luke Kennard from the Atlanta Hawks and later signed Kobe Bufkin to a two-year deal. Will they regret that? Time will tell.
The Lakers will look to begin their post-All-Star push when they take on the Los Angeles Clippers at Crypto.com Arena on Friday at 10 PM ET.
