The team has acknowledged that it will be a work in progress. As James put it before the start of training camp, “I don’t think it’s going to be like peanut butter and jelly to start the season.”
Any mention of preseason basketball ought to come with the disclaimer that the games are fairly meaningless. But the Lakers did go 0-6, which was enough to raise some important questions: Is this a hodgepodge roster? Can a team this old withstand the rigors of an 82-game regular season? And, perhaps most important, can Westbrook and James, two ball-dominant players, coexist in a productive way?
Frank Vogel, the team’s coach, said he had no such concerns.
“There’s definitely a willingness for those guys to share and sacrifice,” he said, adding, “It’s tough to get 15-plus-year vets to be completely serious about the preseason.”
For his part, James said Monday that he had fully recovered from the ankle injury that slowed him toward the end of last season — “I didn’t do much basketball for the first two months of the summer,” he said — and that he was ready for a fresh start, one that will come against an opponent that, unlike the Lakers, hopes to reach into its past.