Throughout much of the past 1.5 seasons, dating back to the jarring, unforeseen acquisition of Luka Dončić, the Los Angeles Lakers haven’t always played or looked like the most cohesive team. This summer, with the departure of three starters in LeBron James, Deandre Ayton and Rui Hachimura and an influx of free agent signings, another assimilation period for Los Angeles to mesh will be required.
Despite the many new faces and only two incumbent starters from 2025-26, head coach JJ Redick believes
this year’s preseason has afforded him and the Lakers more opportunities to refine their execution in key spots — something he felt they needed more of prior to the last year’s regular-season opener.
“We’ve been able to take our time more in terms of teaching and installs,” Redick told reporters prior to Friday’s game against the Denver Nuggets. “We’ve also been able to cover not only more special situations, like we had one today in our shootaround. It’s the third time we’ve covered that, so we’ve had time to kind of double and triple down on a lot of things that maybe we’ve only had one pass through last year before our first game.”
While optimism is abundant during virtually every team’s training camp and preseason, that sort of development is assuredly a positive for the Lakers. Depending how deeply Redick taps into his bench most nights, they could have as many as seven or eight new rotation players this season, with the lone holdovers from 2025-26 being Dončić, Austin Reaves and Jake LaRavia. As many opportunities as possible to establish some familiarity and connection ahead of Wednesday’s game against the Golden State Warriros is welcomed.
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the Lakers can gel defensively. They’re seemingly embracing a more aggressive, turnover-pursuant approach this season, which requires tons of synergy to be properly executed. I anticipate the offense — even if more potent by year’s end than this week — to be pretty dang good out of the gates with Dončić and Reaves surrounded by a bevy of play-finishers and spacers. But the defense might be wobblier to open the year and projects as the lesser of Los Angeles’ two units, so monitoring what level this group begins at and where it can get to may be crucial in determining the Lakers’ ceiling for 2026-27.
You can follow Jackson on Twitter at @jackfrank_jjf.
