'Disappointing teams': ESPN's voters ranked the Lakers first. Boring is the better charge.

ESPN's preseason predictions also project a 45-37 Lakers season, an eight-win drop. My column: missing out on Jonathan Kuminga was the cheapest thing that happened to them all summer.

ESPN's NBA reporters voted the Los Angeles Lakers the team most likely to fall off this season. The vote, part of a preseason superlatives package under the label “Disappointing teams: Which team will take a tumble this season?”, was written up on August 29, 2026 by Silver Screen and Roll, the Lakers site. The same outlet notes ESPN separately projected the Lakers at 45-37.

Do the subtraction ESPN's own writers left on the table: 45 wins is an eight-win drop, which puts last season at 53. Eight fewer wins is one flipped result every ten games. That is not a collapse. That is a slightly duller winter at Crypto.com Arena, and for a city that buys tickets on star power, dull is the actual risk.

My take: they're not doomed, they're flat

Disappointment requires expectation, and ESPN already set the number low. You cannot be shocked by a team you forecast into the six seed. What the Lakers have built is something else — a roster with one enormous name and a long tail of names most fans in Los Angeles could not pick out of a lineup.

Gone is LeBron James, and, per Silver Screen and Roll, so is the entire starting group that played most of the six-game series win over the Houston Rockets. In their place is a supporting cast assembled to fit Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves and head coach JJ Redick's system. The same site has called Quentin Grimes a settled starter and credits Sandro Mamukelashvili with the stretch-five spacing the frontcourt lacked last season. On August 28, 2026, it published a list of five candidates for the last starting spot — which tells you the spot is still open.

The Kuminga bill they never had to pay

Jonathan Kuminga signed a two-year, $13 million deal with the Minnesota Timberwolves, on reporting from August 2026. Silver Screen and Roll's own piece on the Lakers' free agency doesn't carry those terms; its August 27, 2026 column by Bryan Toporek argues Kuminga and his agent, Aaron Turner, “misread his free-agent market for the second straight offseason.”

I'd call that miss the cheapest thing that happened to the Lakers all summer. An open fifth starting job costs a team some September anxiety. A wrong contract costs it two years of flexibility. The Lakers ended up with the anxiety.

The strongest case against me

Here is the pushback, and it is real: a team leaning this hard on one star, with no fifth starter locked in and an ownership handoff overhead, is the exact recipe for a season that curdles. Silver Screen and Roll has reported the ownership churn — Mark Walter selling, Bob Iger and Josh Kushner incoming — and reported that fans are uneasy about it. Stars get worn down, depth gets exposed, front offices get distracted. That is how disappointment happens.

The answer is in ESPN's own forecast. The same preseason package projects Dončić to win the scoring title and finish third in MVP voting. A team whose best player is a top-three MVP finisher in your own prediction is not your best guess for the league's biggest faceplant. And as Silver Screen and Roll points out, the two teams that actually traded away their stars after play-in seasons — the Charlotte Hornets and the Los Angeles Clippers — didn't top the disappointment column.

So: not the most disappointing. The most boring, with a scoring champion in it. Revisit the standings in February.

Source: silverscreenandroll.com, retrieved August 30, 2026.