Sportsnaut opens training camp with the Lakers at No. 14. Jason Burgos’s preseason power rankings, which Yahoo Sports also carries, put them squarely in the middle of the league. His case leans mostly on last season, when injuries to Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves arrived at the worst time and undercut the Lakers’ playoff run.
Fourteenth Is a Fringe Playoff Slot
In a 30-team league, 14th is not a contender slot. It puts a team that won 53 games last season behind nearly half the league and implies the Lakers are closer to the play-in than to the second round. Burgos treats the late-season surge as real but the playoff collapse as the more telling result. That’s a defensible starting point, but it’s the most pessimistic one available.
The National Range Runs Sixth to 14th, With Sportsnaut at the Bottom
Nobody else ranks the Lakers this low. USA Today slotted them seventh, calling this Dončić’s team with role players still to prove themselves. ClutchPoints went higher, at sixth, though its biggest question was a defense that ranked 19th in defensive rating and couldn’t keep opponents out of the paint.
The skeptics land closer to Sportsnaut without matching it. Bleacher Report has the Lakers 12th and lists them at +5000 to win the title. In late August, Heavy’s scout-sourced rankings put them 11th, and a Western Conference coach told the outlet the roster had too many holes: “I see them as a 46, 47-win team.”
The betting market agrees with that coach. BetMGM set the Lakers’ regular-season win total at 46.5, roughly the profile of a 10th-to-12th-place team in a league this deep. ESPN’s offseason recap names Dončić one of the summer’s winners, but it also notes that the newly extended Reaves is the only one of the Lakers’ top seven in playoff minutes still on the roster.
That makes Sportsnaut the bearish outlier, but only by a few spots. The real split is between outlets ranking the Lakers on Dončić’s ceiling (sixth, seventh) and outlets ranking them on roster uncertainty (11th, 12th, 14th).
Tenth to 12th Is the Honest Slot
The skeptics have the better argument. Most of the roster that won 53 games is gone, and the new one is built around a center the Lakers paid heavily for. Per ESPN, landing Walker Kessler cost two unprotected first-round picks (2031 and 2033) and pick swaps in 2028 and 2030, followed by a four-year, $130 million contract for a player who appeared in only five games last season because of injuries. A top-seven ranking assumes the Kessler bet and the defense both work before anyone has seen either.
Fourteenth goes too far the other way. Dončić led the league at 33.5 points per game last season, with 8.3 assists, 7.7 rebounds and 1.6 steals, and a player at that level raises a team’s floor in a way a mid-table ranking ignores. The injuries Burgos leans on say more about last spring’s luck than about this rotation.
The fair placement is 10th to 12th, close to where Heavy’s scouts, Bleacher Report and the betting market already sit. Two things would move the Lakers higher: Kessler staying healthy enough to be the rim protector he was paid to be, and the defense climbing out of the bottom half. If neither happens by December, Sportsnaut’s 14th will look less like an outlier and more like an early read.
Source: Jason Burgos’s camp-opening list
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