The Los Angeles Lakers will be good this season. That's what happens when you have Luka Dončić and LeBron James on the same team with a handful of good to great role players around them. I believe this team will win loads of games and compete for a top-three seed in the Western Conference.
The center position is still kind of a mess.
It's better than it was last year, surely, thanks to some free agency luck this offseason when the Trail Blazers cut ties with Deandre Ayton and he fell into the Lakers' laps. But Ayton is anything but a consistent presence on the low block. If anything, he's a frustratingly inconsistent presence at the position. And now the Lakers are banking on him to be their every night, 30-plus minute per game center with no real backup plan, other than praying that his off games can be mitigated by the brilliance of the playmakers around him.
Is it the worst plan in the world? Not really, because Ayton's new teammates truly are brilliant and his role in Los Angeles will be markedly smaller than it was in Portland or Phoenix for that matter.
But he won't be able to completely disappear. Some nights the Lakers will need him to dominayton (sorry) and he's going to need to prove that he can do that when called upon. Remember, Ayton got cut from the Portland Trail Blazers for 20 year-old rookie Yang Hansen. The team, which drafted a center in the first round last year, drafted another center in the first round this year, even while Ayton was still on the roster. That's how ready they were to move on from him.
Behind Ayton, the center position gets very scary, very quickly.