Why the numbers suggest that this is the most disappointing Lakers season of all time

The Lakers have existed since the Truman administration, but they missed the playoffs just 12 times before this season. When a team succeeds to the degree that they have, their disappointments become that much greater. Google “most disappointing teams in NBA history” and you’ll see a smattering of Lakers rosters. Some of them were genuinely disastrous. Others, such as the 2004 team, managed to disappoint despite reaching the NBA Finals. When championships are the expectation, anything less looks like a disaster.

And the 2021-22 Lakers did a lot less. They won’t make the Finals … or the playoffs … or even reach the play-in round. They were eliminated from contention after losing to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday, and to add insult to injury, they don’t even have a first-round pick to fall back on. This is one of the few Laker seasons that warrants the disappointment that has been attributed to it. In fact, by nearly any measure, it is the most disappointing team in franchise history.

With 80 games in the books, the Lakers have won 38.8 percent of their matchups. That isn’t the worst mark in team history, but it’s not far off, either. Only seven Laker teams have done worse, and each has a compelling explanation for their struggles.

• The 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 Lakers were rebuilding after Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles tendon.
• The 1975 Lakers were one season away from acquiring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but hadn’t yet replaced Jerry West, who retired in 1974.
• The 1958 and 1960 Lakers were playing the team’s final seasons in Minneapolis and were doing so without retired legend George Mikan. Their struggles allowed the team to select West in 1960. Also, the 1960 team endured a plane crash. Nobody was injured, but that couldn’t have been helpful for team morale.

These are the only Laker teams in history to play worse than this group did, and they were all in transitional periods. This was not supposed to be a transitional period. LeBron James might win the scoring title. The Lakers acquired Russell Westbrook in an attempt to win the championship. Such expectations were not realistic to those other teams. 

Those expectations make this season’s Lakers debacle that much worse. While Vegas odds vary from book to book, basketball-reference’s odds tracker listed the Lakers with a 52.5-win over/under before the season. They currently have 31 wins. At best, they’ll finish 19.5 wins below that preseason expectation. Basketball-reference tracks win total projections back to the 1995-96 season, and that is the further below their projection the Lakers have finished since then. 

In fact, you could combine many of the seasons previously considered among the most disappointing in team history and still not reach this season’s total. As an example, the 2012-13 team featuring Bryant, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash and Pau Gasol finished 13.5 games below their 58.5-win expectation, and the 2003-04 team that added Gary Payton and Karl Malone to the Bryant-Shaquille O’Neal core finished 2.5 games off of their own 58.5 win marker. The Lakers have already guaranteed a finish worse than those two combined. 

The failure that this season turned into goes beyond the Laker franchise. They entered this season with the second-best championship odds in the league at +425. That makes them the first team with top-two championship odds to miss the playoffs outright since 2005. Three teams tied with +500 championship odds that season, according to basketball-reference, and two of them (the Timberwolves and, ironically, the Lakers) missed the postseason. Dating back to 1985, when basketball-reference began tracking these numbers, those are the only two teams to accomplish the dubious feat.

That is how historically disastrous this Lakers season has been. There have been bad teams in Lakers history and there have been underwhelming teams with enormous expectations … but never in their history, and likely NBA history, has a team so miserably combined both. Give the Lakers credit. When things go badly for them, they tend to go worse than anyone could have possibly imagined.