Congrats, Toronto Raptors! It barely took two days for your NBA championship to be swept into the category of “old news” by Klay Thompson’s ACL injury and the Los Angeles Lakers’ blockbuster trade for Anthony Davis on Saturday night. Pro basketball has a reputation for never having an offseason, but this past week was a whirlwind even by NBA standards.
So in that spirit of never living in the league’s present moment, let’s look ahead to what the flurry of recent news might mean for the NBA title race in 2019-20. We’ll start with the Lakers, who vaulted into first place in the betting markets’ championship odds after trading for Davis. But just how good will they be?
We ran our very own CARMELO ratings — our projections that assess each team’s strength based on its roster — on the current Lakers (that is, with Davis included and renouncing all the free agents who are likely to leave the team over the offseason). And keeping in mind that the following depth chart may bear little resemblance to the version LA rolls out in the fall, the Lakers as currently constituted are projected to have a +5.8 net efficiency rating and a full-strength regular season Elo rating of 1652. That’s good, although it doesn’t exactly guarantee the team a title — for comparison, that rating would have ranked ninth in the league at the end of this past regular season.
