Stephen A. Smith: The Lakers Are Abusing LeBron James and Anthony Davis

The Los Angeles Lakers are struggling and there is no end in sight. They are sitting at 17-18, good for 10th in the Western Conference, with LeBron James and Anthony Davis playing nearly every game. Give the two stars' recent injury history that's not likely to last, which means things are probably going to get worse before they get better. And they are already quite bad, given last night's loss to the Miami Heat sparked a sourced piece from The Athletic about how Darvin Ham is losing the locker room as he desperately changes lineups and rotations to find something that works.

Was it all predictable? To an extent. In a league centered around offensive excellence driven by three-point shooting, the Lakers did not do much over the offseason to become a better shooting team and remain one of the worst in the league, both in terms of three-point volume and accuracy. The ol' "we have LeBron and AD" strategy hasn't worked since the bubble, yet LA seemed convinced it would work again this season. They've had some unfortunate injury luck to guys like Jarred Vanderbilt and Gabe Vincent, to be sure, but it didn't require Nostradamus-like foresight to see that a defense-first team with no spacing would be hovering around .500 in early January.

Still, the fact of the matter remains that the Lakers appear to be hurtling towards another lost season with LeBron and this is something many people will not stand. Stephen A. Smith is one of those people and said the Lakers are "abusing" LeBron and AD by failing them this badly.

Yeah. A little dramatic, as is Stephen A.'s wont. Their teammates are letting them down, to be sure, as is the coaching staff and front office. But abusing? Well, that's strong.

Ultimately the biggest insult that can be paid to the Lakers is that they are wasting LeBron and AD. This is an incredibly rare season for both in that they have been healthy and at the peak of their current capabilities for multiple months. That has never happened with both outside of the bubble and look how that turned out. The Lakers could have done more to surround them with better complementary players, but they did not. They've failed to maximize a championship pairing, an especially painful realization given how the superteam era collapsed after the end of the Golden State Warriors dynasty.

If Smith is already busting out words like "abuse" then we're in for a fun ride when things get worse. Because they will. Perhaps quite soon.