ESPN rolled out its NBA Future Power Rankings on Tuesday, projecting on-court success for all 30 teams across the next three seasons. The Lakers land in the West’s second tier — a strong current roster dragged down by a barren draft cupboard — and for once, the national read is close to unanimous.

What They Said

The exercise, built by ESPN analysts rating teams across five categories, is unsparing about what the Kessler deal cost. The Lakers rank 29th in the draft subcategory after dealing two unprotected first-round picks and two first-round swaps in the Walker Kessler sign-and-trade.

The counterweight is the roster itself. The current players are still good — led, of course, by MVP candidate Luka Dončić — and the Lakers win the market subcategory because of the attractive glitz and glamor of Los Angeles. Bobby Marks frames the central worry plainly: with nine new players and LeBron James no longer on the roster, can this team led by Dončić compete for a championship? The Lakers have no cap flexibility for the foreseeable future and saw their draft assets stripped in the Kessler sign-and-trade. Los Angeles has no future firsts available to trade and only three seconds.

How That Compares

The interesting thing is how little daylight there is between ESPN and everyone else. Vegas set the win total in the mid-40s, and the number surprised Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon on the ESPN Hoop Collective podcast, given the Lakers won 53 games last season, 50 the year before, and 47 in 2023-24. Windhorst’s projection was blunt in the other direction — he expects the two-star core to win a lot of games because their three best players are pretty good and fit together.

Scouts polled by Sports Illustrated split the same way. One Western Conference coach told the outlet the Lakers are a team to watch who will score and be fun to watch, but they’re lacking size and rebounding and asking too much of Kessler, pegging them at 46 or 47 wins. ESPN’s own Summer Forecast projected them at 45-37 and the No. 6 seed in the West.

Zach Lowe sits at the bearish extreme. In July he argued the Lakers look like a team that has next to no chance to beat the Thunder and Spurs in a playoff series in the next two to three years, with almost no outs to change their team. That’s the same concern ESPN’s draft grade encodes — no picks, no flexibility, capped at the first apron — just stated as a verdict rather than a subcategory.

The Smart Money Is On…

ESPN has this about right, and the near-consensus is the tell. Strip away the framing and every analyst is describing the same two-sided team: an offense that should be one of the league’s best next to a checkbook and a draft board that are both empty.

The bull case is real and grounded in real numbers — the Lakers went 30-11 last season in games Dončić and Reaves both played, a pace that stretches to roughly 60 wins over a full schedule. The problem is that phrase, “both played.” Dončić missed the entire 2026 postseason with a hamstring injury, and Kessler missed 77 games in 2025-26. A team this dependent on availability, with no picks to trade for insurance, is exactly the profile of a strong present and a foreclosed future.

So the ranking is fair. The Lakers are a good team now and a stuck one later, and the only thing that changes the second half is Dončić staying healthy long enough to make the first half moot. Lowe’s floor is too low and Windhorst’s ceiling assumes health the last two Aprils didn’t deliver — the truth is the boring middle ESPN landed on.

Source: ESPN