The Lakers are starting to find their way

Simply looking at the Lakers 11-2 record tells you they’ve been playing really well to start the season. Irrespective of the competition, you simply don’t win at this rate — including seven games in a row after Wednesday’s victory in Milwaukee — without doing way more things right than wrong.

That said, one of the benefits of watching a team on a day-to-day basis is that you gain perspective on what you’re watching, are better able to contextualize the results and can speak to the differences between, say, an 11-point win against the Bucks vs. a 10-point win against the Hawks against a six-point win over the Raptors.

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The details from any one of those games matter and help provide the arc and narrative of where the team has been and, maybe more importantly, where they could be going. You can also find the themes that help you, even this early in the year, establish what the team actually is.

For example, the numbers tell you the Lakers are the best offense in the league and that Luka Dončić is on the sort of start to the season that forgest MVP campaigns. These things are related and are easily the top data point for why the Lakers have the record that they do.

Again, though, watching this team every day gives you access to more than what a visit to the NBA Stats page or Cleaning the Glass would tell you about the team. Those tools help contextualize what you watch, but they cannot replace what you observe with your own eyes. They also cannot prove the nuance of and aforementioned details that go into the progression — or in some cases, regression — that comprises the march through what is a marathon of an 82-game campaign.

Which leads me back to why I’m here in the first place.

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While the Lakers are 11-2, I’d argue they are just now starting to find their way of what they are and who they can as a team. Because their record is what it is, I think it would be easy to conflate their success with them hitting the ground running, but that would be a mistake. It’s not that the team isn’t playing well — of course they are, look at their record! — but it’s more that the version of…

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Publish date : 2026-11-13 16:24:00

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