All Ball Sports: LeBron, Life at 40, Army’s shining Black Knights      

by Paul Teetor

Over a four-game losing streak this week, LeBron James missed 20 consecutive three-point shots.

Let me repeat that staggering statistic in Live Oak Park terms: LeBron bricked 20 straight threes. Dude was straight up shooting blanks.

If that happened at Live Oak Park in Manhattan Beach or Clark Park in Hermosa Beach, his teammates would stop passing him the ball and tell him to take a seat on the bench.

But he’s not playing on a Live Oak team. He’s playing on a team known as the Lakers – or the Fakers, based on their current form.

What does that statistic suggest as LeBron approaches his 40th birthday on December 30?

It suggests that his legs are tired from playing too many minutes, his million-dollar body is weary from carrying the Lakers, and he knows his team is going nowhere except to the bottom of the standings.

The Lakers season is officially one quarter of the way through their schedule already.

But unofficially their season already feels over.

All that optimistic talk from new coach JJ Redick and rest of the Lakers organization early in the season – when they raced out to a 10-4 record while playing a soft schedule — has faded away into silence.

As of Sunday night they had lost seven of their last nine games – by an average of more than 21 points — and had fallen to a 12-11 record.

At this rate they won’t even make the playoffs. Indeed, they will be lucky to make the play-in tournament, where the ninth and tenth place teams have one last chance to make the real playoffs by playing the seventh and eighth place teams.

Over the course of their current losing streak the Lakers blew a game to Orlando by missing a bunch of last-minute free throws and giving the Magic a chance to storm back. Then they were embarrassed by Denver in the second half, outclassed by Phoenix, out-toughed by Oklahoma City, and destroyed in Minnesota.

But all that ineptitude paled in comparison to the stinker the Lakers put on full display Wednesday night in Miami when the Lakers – led by two superstars in LeBron and Anthony Davis — lost by 41 points to a Heat team without its best player, Jimmy Butler.

The performance was so bad that Redick started sounding like Coach Darvin Ham last season, in the weeks before Ham was fired by General Manager Rob Pelinka.

“I’m embarrassed, we’re all embarrassed,” Redick said after the game. “It’s not a game that I thought we had the right fight, the right professionalism. Not sure what was lost in translation.”

Then Redick, who played 15 years in the NBA as a shooting guard but has been a coach for less than six months, stopped himself because he realized he had just made a cardinal sin in the player-centric NBA: he had blamed the players.

He quickly back-tracked: “There has to be some ownership on the court, and I’ll take all the ownership in the world. This is my team and I lead it and I’m embarrassed,” he said. “But I can’t physically get us organized. I can’t physically be into the basketball. I can’t physically talk and call out switches and physically call out coverages.”

Oops!

He did it again. Blamed the players by pointing out that they are the ones on the court missing shots, throwing lazy passes and playing matador defense.

And again he tried to fix it. 

“I’m not blaming the players,” he said. “I own this but I’m going to need some ownership on the court as well.”

So All Ball will do Redick a favor and say what he can’t: the top-heavy roster is a mess, and there’s no way to fix it because Rob Pelinka has painted the Lakers into a corner with no way out. Beyond James and Davis, they don’t have a single player good enough to be a starter on a title contender.

And whose fault is that?

Pelinka.

He’s the guy who signed softer-than-Charmin guard D’Angelo Russell, and who drafted complete bust Jalen Hood-Schifino with the 17th pick last year instead of UCLA’s Jaime Jacques. Jacquez was taken by Miami with the very next pick, made the all -rookie team last year, and helped destroy the Lakers Wednesday night.

Think about the sheer ineptitude of that decision alone. The Lakers had four years to watch Jacquez develop at UCLA in their own backyard, saw him win PAC-12 Player of the Year in his senior year, and heard him tell the local media that of course it was his dream to play for the Lakers.

And they passed on him with the lame explanation that he was 22 years old and therefore didn’t have nearly as much upside as Hood-Schifino, who came out after his freshman year. That was absurd on its face because the Lakers were in win-now mode, needed players who were ready to play, and had no use for a guy that would take years to develop.

For that dumb move alone Pelinka deserves to be fired. Last month the Lakers declined to pick up Hood-Schino’s third year option, meaning he has shown absolutely no signs of developing into a legit NBA player and will probably never play in the league after this season.

Pelinka is also the guy who signed D’Angelo Russell to the Lakers for a second stint, after Magic Johnson      – back when he was running the Lake Show — practically gave him away to New Jersey just to get him and his toxic game out of town.

And Pelinka is responsible for signing players like Cam Reddish and Jaxon Hayes, former lottery picks who washed out with the teams that drafted them but still commanded big-time salaries from the Lakers even after they had proved that they couldn’t play.

No, Redick can’t say it if he wants to keep his job: Pelinka – whose only qualification was that he was Kobe Bryant’s agent – has handed him a roster that has only three legit players – Rui Hachimura, Austin Reeves and rookie Dalton Knecht – beyond his two superstars.

But do we hear Pelinka taking ownership of the roster he constructed?

Nope. 

And so yet another Lakers coach is on the toll road to being fired until owner Jeanne Buss realizes the Lakers problem is not on the court.

The problem is in the front office.

That’s life at 40 for LeBron James.

The March of the Black Knights

Dedicated All Ball Reader, Vietnam War vet and former three term Manhattan Beach Mayor Bob Holmes reached out to praise the Army football team, which has now raised its record to 11-1 with an upset victory over Tulane Friday night. Tulane was a five-point favorite, but Army stomped them 35-14 and is now ranked 24th in the Associated Press poll.

And Tulane was no pushover. They were 9-3 going into the game.

While the Black Knight’s success is impressive by itself, Holmes says the young cadets deserve a special mention because the Service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force) prohibit their players from accepting any NIL (Name, image and likeness) money. In an age of million-dollar college quarterbacks, that is quite a sacrifice for your country.

And if you try to use the portal to transfer to Army, you are given zero credit for any classes taken at your current college or university.

Finally, if you are a really great player, upon graduation you don’t get go to the NFL.  Instead, you begin a mandatory 5-year active-duty commitment, most likely in Infantry, Armor, or Artillery.  You face almost certain deployment to whatever hotspot the U.S. is involved in at the time.

So all hail the Black Knights of West Point. They don’t play the game of football for fame or fortune. They play it for the love of the game.        

Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com