It fills my heart with gladness when I see Lakers fans struggling with the fact that their young core of players (especially the duo of Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball) are just not that good right now. It’s no secret that those two have struggled mightily with LeBron out for a significant amount of time. Lakers fans spent so much of their energy telling the rest of us morons that Ball was going to dominate the court from the first time he stepped on it.
It turns out that the only thing Ball can dominate is having bad efficiency, and Lakers fans are finally starting to accept it. This makes me happy because it is punishing Laker fans for their hubris, and I also tend to think that fans of big market teams deserve extra punishment for the reason that they don’t, by rule, have to suffer whenever a big-name free-agent passes their team up for a team in a bigger market. I’m all about fanbases getting punished for things, and I think it stems from the fact that I was punished by being a Bucks fan for so long that I want everybody else to know my pain.
Ball had a pretty good game last night, but the Lakers still only beat the Bulls by seven points, so I would say that their downward spiral is continuing. Maybe LeBron should take a page out of the Jimmy Butler/Dwyane Wade/Kyrie Irving playbook and put the young guys on blast for sucking. That wouldn’t fix any problems with the team but at least it would have the effect of meting out more punishment to egotistical Laker fans.