Kendrick Perkins has seen enough from the Los Angeles Lakers, as the former Boston Celtics champion and ESPN analyst delivered a blunt verdict on the team’s playoff chances, and it left very little room for optimism.

The Lakers entered the final stretch of the regular season riding genuine momentum, having won 16 of 18 games with Luka Doncic playing at an MVP level. A 139-96 demolition at the hands of the OKC Thunder on April 2 changed everything. Doncic aggravated his left hamstring and was ruled out for the remainder of the regular season. Days later, Austin Reaves was diagnosed with a Grade 2 left oblique injury, eliminating him from the regular season as well.

With two of the team’s three leading scorers suddenly gone, the Los Angeles Lakers’ postseason ceiling collapsed almost overnight, and Perkins made sure everyone understood what he saw.

“The Lakers are dead birds, tall grass,” Perkins said on ESPN’s First Take. “This season is over. They’re a first-round exit. It’s no way in hell you’re gonna ask a 41-year-old LeBron James to lead in this tough Western Conference without Luka and Austin Reaves… If I was the Lakers, I would just go ahead and shut Luka down for the season… This team is dysfunctional.”

Perkins did not stop at the injury toll alone. He pointed to the fracturing relationship between JJ Redick and his role players as further evidence of a team coming apart at the seams, noting that the coaching staff and the roster are no longer aligned in their approach.

The dysfunction Perkins described is hard to dismiss entirely. Austin Reaves was averaging 23.3 points per game before going down, while Luka Doncic led the entire NBA at 33.5 points per game.

Together, they accounted for the offensive architecture that allowed Los Angeles to build a 52-29 record. Without them, the weight of the entire campaign falls squarely on one man.

LeBron James to Lead Los Angeles Lakers Without Doncic and Reaves in Playoffs

James is still averaging 20.6 points per game at 41 years old, a remarkable production figure by any measure.

But carrying a playoff series against the Western Conference’s elite is a different proposition entirely, and even the King appeared sober about what lies ahead.

“I mean, it’s a challenge for us,” James said. “It’s always got to be a next-man-up mentality. But there’s no way you can replace that type of impact. So it’s going to be a collective group. We all have to figure out a way to do a little bit more.”

The urgency in James’s framing was deliberate. He acknowledged that the margin for error shrinks dramatically without his two co-stars, as he said, “When you lose a special player like that, you can’t have as many mistakes. So we got to figure that out.”

Whether LeBron James can shoulder this group through a best-of-seven series remains the defining question of the Lakers’ season, but Kendrick Perkins, for one, seems to have already made his call.

Do you think LeBron James will be able to lead the Los Angeles Lakers in this critical phase? Let us know!

Read more at Air Jordan Chronicles!

Written by

Suryakant Das

Edited by

Arvind Rao