Editor’s note: This is the Friday April 29 of the Purple & Bold Lakers newsletter from reporter Kyle Goon. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.

We’re about six weeks from the end of the NBA season, but this much is certain: A lot of people have already lost a lot of money from their preseason prognostications.

Going back to those sunny days, there were two favorites: the Brooklyn Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers. The website Sports Betting reported 24.5% of itsbettors putting their money down on the Nets while 21.6% put their bets on the Lakers. At the website Bet Online, the Lakers (22.2%) and Nets (22.1%) were in a virtual dead heat. No other team got more than 10.3% (Golden State) according to either site as of Oct. 14, just a week or so out from the season. The Lakers had already gone 0-5 in the preseason.

Of course, it’s easy to poke holes in retrospect, but the point is prevailing popular sentiment had heralded the coastal franchises because of their superstar cores: In the West, LeBron James and Anthony Davis had added Russell Westbrook, while the East was seen to be trembling beneath the potential of the Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden trio that had fallen prey to injuries the season before.

The Lakers have been done for some time now. The end came for Brooklyn earlier this week with an unceremonious four-game sweep by the Boston Celtics, and the basketball world was all too happy to throw stones. (Someone check Stephen A. Smith’s blood pressure). Harden was long gone, replaced in a trade by Ben Simmons who never checked in due to reported “physical and mental hurdles,” and Kyrie Irving unironically spent one of his postgame press conferences talking about the team’s inability to jell (he played only 29 games because of his refusal to get vaccinated).

The parallels between the stumbles of the two franchises are readily evident: The triple threat of stars in each market didn’t have the chemistry the principals foresaw, the stars themselves were beset by injury, and their rosters weren’t strong enough to pick things up in tough moments. Both franchises are spending the offseason scrambling for answers, with a number of difficult-to-stomach roster decisions ahead of them.

While both collapses in Brooklyn and L.A. have the basketball world shouting about the end of “superteams,” that doesn’t quite nail it.

There are teams still in the fight that are driven by top-flight talent: Phoenix with Chris Paul, Devin Booker and DeAndre Ayton; Milwaukee with Giannis Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton and Jrue Holiday; Miami with Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo and Kyle Lowry; Golden State with Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. None of those trios quite ring out like what the Lakers and Nets put together, but nearly all of them (except Ayton) are All-Stars, past or present.

What they have – that L.A. and Brooklyn did not – are vibrant cultures and gritty role players who don’t fold in big moments. Those qualities have been highlighted in a postseason riddled by injuries: The Suns have missed Booker; the Heat have missed Lowry and Butler; the Bucks have missed Middleton; Curry came into the playoffs off of injury, with Jordan Poole and Gary Payton II notably stepping up in his place.

This gets to the heart of what especially dogged the Lakers this season: While in one sense, collapse came through a handful of painful smaller decisions that didn’t work out, their biggest mistake was taking the path of gutting the middle of the roster for a third star. It didn’t help that Russell Westbrook did not rise to his former MVP level, but in retrospect, going down that path at all might have been the greatest sin even more so than the player the Lakers chose to chase.

The biggest lesson is that the middle matters. Lakers fans spent the season pining for players who understood their roles: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Alex Caruso, Danny Green, Kyle Kuzma – even JaVale McGee and Markieff Morris. They’ve been watching several of them in the playoffs this season. But the Lakers spent their past two offseasons treating role players like interchangeable parts, trying to spin some out for age, money or both and bring others in – inevitably left wondering why the chemistry of the team hasn’t seemed to blend. This past offseason there seemed to be some acknowledgment that they had gone off-course from the championship formula, but bringing back Rajon Rondo and Dwight Howard in their twilight years hardly had the desired effect.

The Nets had a different variation of a similar problem: They had a feisty, young core led by respected coach Lawrence Frank in 2019 when both Durant and Irving landed at their door, fulfilling their wildest dreams. What the NBA world lauded was their culture that had developed talent and made them competitive with players like D’Angelo Russell, Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert and Spencer Dinwiddie. By the start of this season, all of those players and the coach were long gone, replaced by Harden and a number of veterans playing on minimums. Culture isn’t something that teams use to attract superstars – it’s something that winds up being sacrificed on the altar by the whims of the best available talent.

That’s a balance that is undeniably tricky to strike, and it’s clear that both the Lakers and Nets felt their hands forced by trying to compete within preset windows. Fearing James’ inevitable decline (which somehow still hasn’t landed as hard as envisioned), the Lakers reached for a former MVP point guard. Seeing a superteam fueled by some of theleague’s best jump shooters, the Nets struck a deal with the Rockets that scooped out some of their best developing players (which is even before nitpicking that they valued DeAndre Jordan, for example, above Allen, who rightfully became an All-Star this season).

There is, of course, the right time to make a big swing for a star in the trade market. Timely moves like the Bucks’ trade for Holiday, the Suns’ trade for Paul and the Heat’s trade for Lowry stand out as shrewd moves for in-their-prime (or even a little past-prime) pieces who have elevated the competitive level of all those franchises. A somewhat speculative but likely relevant view of the Lakers’ move to get Westbrook is probably a bit of wistfulness that they didn’t pull the trigger on Lowry, a move that in hindsight seemed like it might have gotten them further than the first round in 2021.

But the Lakers had already made their big move fueled by draft capital: Getting Davis in 2019. It cost them players, too, but they still had enough salary left over to get competent role players at reasonable prices – a supporting cast that wound up proving championship-worthy. But whether it was through insecurity or simply classic L.A. star-chasing, they doubled down on a big name, which made them much more top heavy than most rosters in the league. With a healthy James and Davis, they were better, but only to a marginal degree: They were 11-11 when both played this season.

The middle matters. The sync of players like Marcus Smart (the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year), Al Horford, Grant Williams and Derrick White stood out against the Nets’ inferior supporting cast. Brooklyn surely was hurt by missing Joe Harris (the Lakers could point to Kendrick Nunn’s season-long absence as a parallel), but isolation-heavy schemes around Durant and Irving failed to beat a Boston team that played with unity and purpose.

Increasing the top-end talent only seems to exponentially add to the disappointment by the primary stake-holders. Westbrook had no problem letting loose after the season, saying he never got a “fair chance” to succeed. He’s only added to the drama since, deleting all of his Instagram posts this week and leaving only a cryptic message delivered by Nipsey Hussle audio rejecting outside opinions of him. His unpopularity among Lakers fans aside, he’s clearly feeling alienated in the situation he once directly requested.

One need not wonder whether Harden felt the same during his final days in Brooklyn: His trade request to the Sixers spoke volumes about how he was feeling about the experiment. Simmons – who has slowly leaked information about his mental health challenges in returning to play – probably has an uphill push to find happiness with the Nets after widespread disappointment that he never played this season despite hopes he would finally suit up.

Championship teams need stars: That’s why many of the players involved in these failures already have rings (though it seems notable that the third stars added do not). But beyond the biggest names, contenders also need supporters like Mikal Bridges, Bobby Portis, Tyler Herro and Jordan Poole. The secondary names may not carry the weight that the big guns do, but as units, they provide the foundation and framework for a team to vault from good to great.

The Lakers had it, but didn’t seem to value what they had. The Nets might have had a better chance to win with two stars instead of three. Now they’re both watching from the sidelines, seemingly closer to a reckoning instead of championship rings.

– Kyle Goon

Editor’s note: Thanks for reading the Purple & Bold Lakers newsletter from reporter Kyle Goon. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.

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