The Morning After
The final curtain on the 2025-26 season has fallen, and the Lakers should be taking notes.
Jalen Brunson and the Knicks capped off an incredible playoff run by closing out the Spurs in five games, with Brunson delivering one final clutch takeover. For San Antonio, a postseason that showcased the promise of its young core ended with a reminder of how unforgiving the biggest stage can be. The youth and fearlessness that helped fuel their run also contributed to some costly late-game breakdowns when the pressure was at its highest.
The NBA season has always felt strange to me in that way. We grind through the marathon of 82 regular-season games, then come the playoffs, where only the strongest and healthiest survive. There are unforgettable moments, incredible battles, and sometimes career-defining storylines. Then, just like that, it’s over.
The next morning, the focus shifts. The conversation turns to the offseason and the season ahead.
For the Lakers, to be fair, that transition happened over a month ago. Their season ended on May 11 when Oklahoma City completed a second-round sweep and sent them into an offseason that has already generated no shortage of team-building content and discussion here at digginbasketball.
Now, though, the real action is finally about to begin. The first major domino of the summer, the Giannis Antetokounmpo situation, is expected to fall before or during the NBA Draft on June 23. What happens there could shape the direction of multiple franchises, including the Lakers.
At the same time, the Lakers can officially begin negotiations with their own free agents and start making decisions that will define the next chapter of the Luka Dončić era. None may be bigger than the one involving 41-year-old LeBron James and whether that next chapter still includes one of the greatest players the game has ever seen.
But before we get back to Lakers offseason scenarios, the draft, cap sheets, and trade ideas, I want to take a step back and reflect on what we just witnessed and how it should influence the Lakers' thinking this summer.
Today’s highlights:
Lesson No. 1 – Don't copy a blueprint, maximize your own strengths
Lesson No. 2 – A heliocentric model can work…
Lesson No. 3: ...if the supporting cast is multidimensional
Lesson No. 1: Don't copy a blueprint, maximize your own strengths
In a way, the Knicks winning the title was a relief for the rest of the NBA. Watching the Western Conference Finals and the abundance of youth, athleticism, and overall talent on the Thunder and Spurs, along with the future assets both teams still possess, was almost demoralizing for everyone else trying to figure out how to compete with them, let alone replicate what they have built.
And the NBA is a copycat league. It's why I wrote after last year's Finals about how many teams would try to replicate the 2025 champion Thunder's model of speed, youth, athleticism, and aggressiveness. Several teams did. The Spurs and Pistons, in particular, joined Oklahoma City as the only three teams to win 60 or more games during the regular season.
But the Knicks showed there is an alternative. They showed that a veteran team can still keep up with the NBA's new wave. They showed that experience still matters. They showed that if you believe in your plan, believe in your star, and stick with it long enough, it can pay off. If you keep optimizing it, squeeze every ounce out of it, and catch a couple of breaks along the way, especially on the injury front, you might just find yourself holding the trophy at the end.
After superteams and the Warriors dynasty dominated the previous decade, the NBA has entered a completely different era. We've now had eight different champions in the last eight years, and not a single Finals team has managed to return the following season.
If you look at the last eight title teams, you don’t just see eight different champions. You see eight different team-building approaches and playing styles. If there is one common theme among them, especially the last six champions, it is that they believed in their stars and did everything possible to surround them with the right supporting cast to maximize their strengths.
