The Los Angeles Lakers never needed Anthony Davis to be a unicorn. It might have seemed like they did, given the mythological stakes involved—the calls to grab the torch from perhaps the greatest player to ever live, and to carry one of the NBA’s most storied franchises while he’s at it—but even the loftiest aspirations begin with exceedingly practical concerns. The thing that makes LeBron James LeBron James is the fact that he sees the game like few ever will, and from that makes plays that few ever could. Yet the way that manifests is in LeBron anchoring a team, day after day, for decades. Not by being a legend, but an inarguable reality.
Davis, in turn, has become one of his own. The Lakers are a different team under rookie head coach JJ Redick, with different organizational priorities. The ball finds Davis in his spots and on his time. If the first action doesn’t take, teammates will wait for AD and search for him again. It shouldn’t be so radical when a team looks first to its bigs, but for years Davis has been a secondary consideration for the Lakers—floating in and out of focus, at times almost incidental to the action. Under the previous coaching administration, entire quarters could roll by without AD getting a single meaningful touch. No more.
“He’s going to be featured on offense, no matter what,” Redick said in an interview with Lakers.com back in July. “He’s going to be featured. He’s going to have the ball. We’ve talked about him being an offensive hub for us. To me, everybody says, ‘Oh, Anthony Davis is great on offense but his real value is defensively.’ His real value is just being Anthony Davis, and the fact that he’s an elite two-way player.”
That has long been true, if not always so apparent in AD’s approach or the way recent Lakers teams ran their offense. Since arriving in Los Angeles in 2019, Davis has never ranked higher than 12th in points per game—a somewhat modest, less insistent kind of stardom. Davis didn’t force much, opting instead to roll and defend and react. He drafted most of his baskets off the playmaking of others. He played his part. This season, Davis is putting up a career-high 31.2 points a night and jostling with Giannis Antetokounmpo for the inside track to the scoring title. Those two have orbited around one another for years, in a sort of call and response of what a modern big should be. Giannis is a model unicorn. His game revealed itself the day the Bucks put the ball in his hands and encouraged him to run free, and so much of his career since has been lived coast-to-coast in a sort of perpetual fast break.
Davis has dabbled in that kind of expansion, but he has found new heights this season by making his already streamlined game even more focused. Tighter. Leaner. More intentional. Redick still wants Davis to take 3s now and again, and he’s hardly the first coach interested in tapping into AD’s potential as a shooter. Back in New Orleans, Alvin Gentry went so far as to run Davis through curls as if he were Klay Thompson. The Lakers’ 2020 run to the title—the most meaningful shooting stretch of Davis’s career—is both undeniable proof that Davis can shoot and a harsh contrast for most of his shooting since. Davis shot just 35 percent outside the paint last season, in what was one of his better jump-shooting campaigns of late. The occasional 3 is nice, but for Davis, it’s often a passive shot—one he’s mostly traded this season for streaking past his defender to hurtle himself toward the basket.
The push to make Davis a shooter came from his touch and natural fluidity. It should work. But why not channel those same qualities, instead, into getting him on the move and letting him course into the paint? Rather than push the limits of what a center can do, Davis and the Lakers are finding better and more varied entry points for him to score in the most time-honored way a big can: by powering his way to the rim as often as possible. We can—and should—marvel at what sets a unicorn apart, but sometimes it’s really all about the horsepower. Davis isn’t just big and strong, but fast. He will beat an opposing big to the spot, and once he does, they don’t have much hope of stopping his all-out assault in the paint without overcommitting and sending him to the line.
When Davis faces up in the post, he draws fouls. When he runs the floor, he draws fouls. When he gets a mismatch, he draws fouls. After just nine games, AD has already attempted 102 free throws—second most in the entire league. Yet when you watch Davis operate, there’s no mystery as to where those calls come from. Sure, he plays for the Lakers, but more importantly: His singular focus is getting to the basket. Davis is as shifty and coordinated as any big in the league, an out-and-out nightmare to defend in space. And those asked to check him often have no rim protection behind them, because they are the rim protection. Godspeed to the wings who dare to rotate over from the weak side; AD is here to remind them—and maybe us—that sometimes life is just an exercise in lost causes:
Redick has held up his end of the bargain in terms of getting Davis the ball, and Davis has delivered by pushing himself in ways he never has before. You can see that in AD’s abandon as he barges toward the rim, but even more in the sheer tonnage of what he’s been able to accomplish as the centerpiece of the offense. If you were to do a full autopsy of AD’s quietest stretches as a Laker—like, say, the fourth quarter of a crushing playoff loss to the Nuggets back in April—you’d find yourself untangling a mess of cause and effect. Clearly the team was not always organized in a way that suited Davis or itself. But even if the game plan were in order, too many Laker guards have viewed themselves as the main character of every possession. And even when they did try to get the ball to Davis, he too often found reasons to give it up. He didn’t always fight for position, or attack his mismatches, or even crash the offensive glass. The biggest changes this season have come in the ways the Lakers establish Davis in the first place, but his willingness to push for more—to insist upon his stardom—has allowed the team to rely on him in a completely different way.
Davis played for teams in New Orleans that were ostensibly built around him, but they were so flawed and outmatched that it hardly mattered. These Lakers aren’t that. The guards can’t keep a man in front of them to save their lives and the bench may come up empty some nights, but there’s talent and an internal logic to the roster and a clear understanding that Davis is the best player in uniform. The most prolific assist combination in the league this season has been LeBron to AD. That connection isn’t new; James has always looked for his superstar running mate. Yet the balance of those connections has shifted. Davis used to finish plays from James; now he makes them possible. Any pick-and-roll with Davis leads with the roll, even when the guy with the ball in his hands happens to be the most transcendent creator of his generation. The circle is now complete.
James has been about as good this season as a player a few weeks away from 40 could reasonably be, but there are blemishes in the every-night brilliance that for so long set him apart. LeBron can’t do everything anymore, and shouldn’t; the Lakers have the means to survive when he takes a back seat in the offense or a literal seat on the bench. It’s telling that the same is no longer true of Davis. There is no such thing as an acceptable substitute. Jaxson Hayes doesn’t cut it. Christian Koloko is just getting back on a basketball court. You could roll out Gabe Vincent stacked on top of D’Angelo Russell in a giant trench coat, but I’m guessing they wouldn’t be able to cover ground like AD.
Davis has always been talented, and often injured, and sometimes flighty. Now he’s simply essential. Every Anthony Davis team ever built has needed Anthony Davis, but no Lakers team—and maybe none of AD’s past teams, period—have been this structurally dependent on his presence. James may elevate the players around him, but it’s Davis who gives them the means to compete. If AD can’t take on the heavy manufacturing of the offense, it falls apart. If he can’t bail out the entire defense, it slips from bad to so much worse. So much falls on Davis, and so much hangs in the balance every time, say, an errant finger sends him to the ophthalmologist. The catch of superstardom is the way it makes you indispensable. All Davis has to do now is what LeBron has done for years: Carry the weight, day after day, for as long as he possibly can.
