Lakers Baffled That Free Agents Don't Like Their Bad Basketball Team

I don’t want to keep piling on the Lakers (yes I do), but their failed wooing of LaMarcus Aldridge sounds like the biggest free-agency botch since Kobe Bryant spent a couple hours yelling at Dwight Howard across a conference-room table. And each new detail that comes out is sadder and more hilarious than the last.

I thought nothing could top this one:

“Everything about playing for the Lakers sounds great, except playing for the Lakers. That sounds terrible.”

But Bresnahan expands upon where the pitch to Aldridge went wrong in his .

The Lakers contended that their analytics pitch would have been stronger if they had a better roster last season and privately expressed envy that Houston’s presentation could be bolstered by projections and on-court analysis of a team that already had James Harden and Howard.

Here, for once, the Lakers have it exactly right. Maybe the basketball side of their presentation would have been better if they weren’t a dogturd-bad basketball team. And yeah, it is kind of bogus that a team like the Rockets, with two actually valuable superstars for Aldridge to play alongside, are allowed to tell him that. Life is unfair.

Bresnahan’s story is a good, sober look at how the pitch was doomed to failure from the beginning. But for high comedy, I direct you to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, a fine reporter who has the ear of the Lakers front office. So when she quotes sources, you are safe in thinking of their words as coming directly from the Staples Center.

Less than 24 hours after meeting with highly coveted free agent LaMarcus Aldridge, the Los Angeles Lakers are “stunned” to hear that Aldridge was less than impressed by their presentation, a source told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne.

The Lakers were the first to sit down with Aldridge, in a meeting that lasted nearly two hours and had seemed to the Lakers to go “really well,” a source told Shelburne.

The Lakers still and truly have no idea what went wrong.