The 2019-20 NBA campaign belonged to the Los Angeles Lakers. First, the Lakers cruised through the truncated regular season and ended up with a 52-19 record, the best in the Western Conference.
Los Angeles then parlayed its dominant regular season into the 2020 NBA Playoffs, as the Lakers won three of their four playoff series in five games. The only team to force a Game 6 was the Miami Heat, and that came in the NBA Finals.
But after such a successful season, Los Angeles didn’t exactly bring the band back together for the 2020-21 campaign.
Danny Green — who played for the Lakers when they won it all at the dawn of the decade — claimed that Los Angeles “for sure” would have won another championship if Los Angeles kept that title team intact.
“I think if we stayed together, I think we for sure would have got one more championship,” Green said when reflecting on his time as a Laker. “People say two, three — it’s very hard to go back to back, but I think we had a really good group, and we would have got one more.”
The 37-year-old was fortunate enough to win a title with three different teams during his NBA career. He played for the San Antonio Spurs when they captured the 2014 NBA title and was a member of the Toronto Raptors when they won their first title in franchise history in 2019.
However, Green was one of several key players who did not stick around for the following season after the Lakers won the title in 2020. Los Angeles dealt him to the Oklahoma City Thunder later that year in a trade that brought point guard Dennis Schroder to the Lakers.
Without Green and the likes of Rajon Rondo and Dwight Howard, Los Angeles limped into the 2021 NBA Playoffs as the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference. The Lakers also lost to the Phoenix Suns — who later represented the conference in the NBA Finals — in the first round.
With LeBron James and Anthony Davis leading the way and a solid supporting cast around them, the 2019-20 iteration of the Lakers stands out as one of the better teams in recent NBA history. But whether or not the team would have won another title if it stayed together is difficult to gauge. A different NBA team has won a title every year in this decade, and the Boston Celtics most recently captured the 2024 championship.
