Of all the criticisms the Los Angeles Lakers received this year, potentially the most legitimate was the organization’s failure to acquire the level of shooting an NBA team needs to have even a moderate amount of success. Instead, former president of basketball operations Magic Johnson bragged about how he had watched the playoffs and discovered that the best shooting teams didn’t win (despite literally the best shooting team ever winning the title), while still employed general manager Rob Pelinka talked about how the Lakers had “thrust.”
Neither of those things proved true, or at least not true enough for the Lakers to make the playoffs, and one of the biggest (and most persistent) individual knocks on the front office was not re-signing veteran center Brook Lopez.