March 9 , 2026
The Lakers finally beat a good team, knocking off the Knicks, which is the NBA equivalent of finally eating your vegetables after a week of living on dessert. For weeks the Lakers have been feasting on the Warriors and Kings like a team that only hunts wounded prey, then promptly folding when confronted by contenders. If they want anyone to believe this Knicks win means something, they’ll have to prove it against the Timberwolves, Nuggets, and Rockets — teams that don’t politely step aside when DeAndre Ayton remembers he’s seven feet tall. He has 5-7 minute stretches where he looks like prime Shaq, and most of the rest of the time he looks like Michael Olowokandi. Meanwhile, poor LeBron James has reached the strange late-career phase where every win without him sparks a national debate about how much better the Lakers are when he’s not playing. Imagine being a top-two player in the history of the sport and hearing talk shows argue that your team finally figured things out… by accident when you were in street clothes. The Lakers may not be better with Lebron on the floor, but it’s not necessarily a fault of his own. The Lakers three best players aren’t great defenders, so you simply cannot put enough defense around them as their roster is currently constructed. That makes JJ Redick’s job the rest of the year a challenge, because he has to figure out how to stagger his lineups to get enough defense around his 3 great players.
Over at Intuit Dome, the Clippers briefly flirted with tanking — or at least the basketball version of quietly drifting toward the lottery. Unfortunately for them, they suddenly realized the Jazz, Kings, and Grizzlies treat tanking like a professional craft. Those teams have years of experience losing with purpose. The Clippers, meanwhile, can’t even tank correctly; they accidentally win just enough games to land in the play-in tournament, where they’ll hope Kawhi Leonard morphs into 2019 Kawhi for two weeks. This version of Kawhi is great, but just maybe not championship level. Somewhere in the background, Kawhi is still waiting for his punishment for allegedly circumventing the salary cap, which is starting to feel like one of those parking tickets that gets lost in the mail for three years before suddenly showing up with interest.
UCLA men’s basketball looks destined for that very familiar NCAA Tournament address: the #9 or #10 seed line. Once upon a time conference tournaments felt like a dramatic last chance to impress the selection committee. Now they feel more like background noise while the bracketologists argue over decimal points in NET rankings. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the Bruins will follow the most Mick Cronin script imaginable: upset a #1 seed like Arizona in a gritty, defensive masterpiece… only to lose in the Sweet 16 to a team from the Missouri Valley Conference that shoots 58% from three for one inexplicable night.
The Rams, meanwhile, are behaving like a team that remembers it was about one half away from the Super Bowl. Trading for Chiefs cornerback Trent McDuffie and immediately making him the highest-paid corner in football is classic “we’re not rebuilding, we’re reloading” behavior. Cornerback was their biggest need, and they attacked it with the subtlety of Aaron Donald hitting a quarterback. Les Snead clearly looked at last season’s NFC Championship loss and decided the best response was to keep the pedal down and try to get back to February before everyone else finishes arguing about cap space spreadsheets.
The Dodgers, who otherwise treat roster construction like a luxury car dealership, suddenly have a reason to watch the World Baseball Classic with nervous energy. Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitching every four or five days instead of his preferred six is like forcing a Ferrari into stop-and-go traffic. It’ll probably survive, but nobody feels great about it. Add in the news that Gavin Stone has shoulder inflammation after looking sharp early in spring training, and suddenly the Dodgers’ otherwise flawless pitching machine has produced its annual “please not another injured arm” moment.
Then there are the Angels, who continue to exist mostly as a reminder that baseball has 30 teams. Vegas lists them at +4000 to win the division, which honestly feels generous given that oddsmakers typically prefer outcomes that have at least a passing relationship with reality. The roster looks like something assembled during a particularly slow afternoon of free agency, and unless several players simultaneously discover hidden superstar abilities, the Angels appear headed toward their annual tradition: finishing last while fans debate which former Angel will thrive somewhere else next year.
Finally, the LA Kings continue their slow slide out of playoff contention, which at least had one silver lining at the trade deadline. GM Ken Holland wisely resisted the classic desperate move of shipping out future assets for a rental player when the team clearly isn’t good enough to justify it. In Los Angeles sports, where teams often operate with the patience of someone stuck in freeway traffic, that kind of restraint almost feels revolutionary. Unfortunately for Kings fans, patience doesn’t show up in the standings.
