What do you think about the Laker team now?

You follow the box scores of the games every day?

Just the Lakers.

You're kidding.

That is really a compliment.

I was pleased to see you smile at the top bar show

because once the game starts, you have a game face.

You don't smile much out there.

I don't think you have to do things for money anymore. Correct. What's up? Laker fans? Welcome to the Laker Film Room podcast, brought you by the Blue Wire Podcast Network. I'm Pete, joined by Darius and Mike. And normally after a game like this, we'd zoom in on the minutia of what happened. And we'll probably still do that a little bit. But in today's pod, I'd like to zoom out and look at where the Lakers stand on a few big picture points. First, identifying some of the kind of core issues the Lakers are facing and then later exploring some of the different possible resolution to those issues. Last night, Lakers fell to 0 and 4 with a 110 to 99 loss in Denver. At Denver is not one of those places where you want to feel like you have to win a game. I've seen some very, very good Lakers teams over the years get their butts kicked in Denver. It's one of the harder places to win on the road. So if you find yourself in a position where like, hey, we really need this game. Definitely not the position you want to

find yourself in. It was also a game, guys, that Russell Westbrook did not play in with a hamstring

injury. And he's been so much at the center of our focus of the discussions around the team,

and not just our focus, but just in general, that getting a look at the team without him, but without any replacements for him, I think, is interesting.

And I want to start with LeBron NAD, because I think that what's left over, simply put, D, we just don't have a lot of guys.

Like, one of the things that I was really against at the beginning of the summer was the idea of having to send Russ home.

I think that that's something that would have represented a failure on our part, right?

Because, and it's simply from a practical standpoint of if you don't have the player that's making $47 million doing anything for you, what you're left with next to LeBron and AD are a group of guys that

are vet minimums and MLE caliber guys. And in that whole idea of slotting that you talk about,

you're asking a lot of guys to do more than what their contracts warrant, right? And what

their play has warranted up until this point. And so with LeBron in particular, he played a lot of point

guard last night. And I think that that's a bigger picture issue in that asking LeBron to be an 82

game point guard and a guy who can get downhill over and over again, I think is becoming an

increasingly unrealistic ask of him. And I think

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