Breaking Down That Lakers Roster When Everything Was Unraveling
The 2016-17 NBA season was rough for Los Angeles. The team finished 17-65. Most of the losses felt predictable, but if you paid attention to the right players, there were moments that actually pointed toward something different three years later. I spent a lot of that season watching film, tracking which rookies made the transition plays, and trying to figure out what the front office was actually testing during games that nobody outside of Southern California was watching. Kobe Bryant retired at the end of that season, and his farewell tour was exactly the spectacle everyone expected. But the real story wasn't him. It was D'Angelo Russell, who at 21 years old was already handling enough defensive attention to slow down entire offenses. Russell played 81 games that year, averaging 16.3 points and 6.1 assists. He wasn't efficient — his true shooting percentage sat around 49 percent — but he made reads that most first-year guards simply don't make yet. Then there was Kenyon Martin Jr. and Timothé Luwawu-Cabarrot, both rookies who saw limited minutes and didn't project as immediate contributors. Martin was athletic but raw. Luwawu-Cabarrot had range but struggled with consistency. Neither of them changed the playoff landscape, though Martin later developed into a respectable rotational player in Sacramento.
The front office also made a move that seemed pointless at the time but later became one of the most discussed transactions in franchise history. They signed Lou Williams to a max deal the following offseason, which cost them cap space for years. In 2016-17, Williams was still with Atlanta, and the Lakers were operating without him. The team's offense during this stretch was stagnant, often feeling more like a practice squad than an NBA roster. One thing most people miss about that season: the Lakers' defensive schemes under Luke Walton were genuinely interesting in limited samples. Walton installed more drop coverage and trap-heavy actions than Mike D'Antoni ever did. The problem was personnel. You can install the best system in the world, but if your center is Timofey Mozgov at age 29 and declining, or Roy Hibbert showing up late in the season, the scheme doesn't matter. I remember specifically filming against Portland in February 2017 where the Blazers ran a simple dribble-handoff into a flare and the Lakers had no answer. Not because of the playbook. Because they didn't have the bodies to rotate properly. Another detail that gets overlooked is how much Brandon Ingram's development was actually visible that year, even in limited minutes. He shot 43 percent from three in just 19 games off the bench. That's not a sustainable rate, but it signaled that his stroke was NBA-ready. His lateral quickness and length on defense also showed flashes, particularly in switch-heavy situations where smaller lineups could survive because Ingram could guard positions four through five.
The coaching staff also gave Julian Nash significant reps in the second half of games, mostly to see if he could handle point guard minutes without turning the ball over. He couldn't consistently do that yet. His 3.5 turnovers per game were unacceptable, but his assist-to-turnover ratio improved slightly as the season went on, which suggested he was figuring things out at a speed that warranted patience. Now, here's a specific edge case I ran into when trying to evaluate this roster for a project I was working on. I wanted to isolate which young players actually improved their efficiency in clutch situations (defined as last five minutes, margin within five points). Most analytics platforms don't break this down clearly for role players on bad teams, since sample sizes are tiny. My workaround was pulling individual possession data from NBA.com's play-by-play API and manually filtering for clutch + low-minute players. It took about six hours to compile and cross-reference, but it revealed that Russell's usage rate in clutch moments dropped significantly compared to his overall average — he was letting other guys take over late, which is either maturity or lack of confidence, and I still debate which. For the record, I think it was the latter at that point in his career. The counter-intuitive insight most people miss: the 2017 Lakers weren't rebuilding the way we later assumed they were. The front office at the time still believed they were close to contending. They'd just lost to the Warriors in the second round the year before, and the narrative was that one piece was missing. What they actually needed was a complete roster turnover, but the organizational mindset hadn't caught up to reality. This disconnect explains why they later overpaid for names like DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis instead of accumulating assets — they were still playing from a mindset of "we're close," not "we're not close at all."
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The limitations of that season's development model were significant. Young players didn't get consistent minutes with other young players, which meant they couldn't build chemistry. They were plugged into a losing culture with no identity beyond "give the ball to the rookie and see what happens." Coaching changes mid-season also disrupted any continuity. By the time Walton got full control, the season was already lost and the experimentation was essentially meaningless for long-term growth. If you're trying to understand what this roster actually produced, don't look at the win-loss record. Look at the individual trajectories. Russell missed the entire 2017-18 season with a knee injury, then bounced back to All-Star caliber play with Minnesota. Ingram became a consistent scorer. Morris later became a playoff contributor. The season itself was pointless in the standings, but the data from those 82 games turned out to be useful for building the team that eventually reached the Western Conference Finals in 2020. I've watched enough of that tape to know that resilience isn't always dramatic. Sometimes it's just a bunch of guys playing meaningless games and still running the right rotation. Sometimes it's a coach installing systems he knows won't work this year but will work in three. The 2017 Lakers didn't celebrate any of that at the time. Nobody really noticed. But the foundation was there, and it held.
