Believe it, Lakers are NBA championship contenders

The Lakers are championship contenders. Luka Dončić is playing as though he’s on a revenge tour and every opposing player has former Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison’s face superimposed on it. Austin Reaves is playing as though he were shortchanged by signing a four-year, $180 million deal over the summer, the richest contract in NBA history for a player who went undrafted. Walker Kessler is playing as though he’s hellbent on fulfilling his vow to “run through a wall” for the Lakers after they emptied their treasure trove of draft capital to acquire him in July. And the Lakers’ role players are playing as though they deeply understood the assignment when they joined a 17-time championship franchise. The Lakers have the league’s best record at 10-2.They’ve won six games in a row. They’re the real deal. They could win it all this season. That isn’t a sentence we thought we’d write heading into this season.

Not with nine new players.Not with so many question marks around their perimeter defense.

Not with their lack of depth at backup center. But now, Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka looks like the Albert Einstein of basketball rosters and coach JJ Redick looks like a superstar whisperer. The Lakers last won a championship in 2020, their first title in 10 years. They could snap their six-year drought this season.Dončić is on a historic tear, averaging 39.3 points (49.8% shooting from the field, 40.7% from beyond the arc), 7.8 rebounds, 7.9 assists and two steals per game. In his first nine games of the season, Dončić scored 361 points, surpassing Michael Jordan’s 347 points in 1986-87 for the most points scored through that period in modern NBA history. But what really made the Lakers look like contenders is how they played without Dončić (lower back tightness) on Sunday against the Pistons.  Without the league’s current front-runner for the MVP Award and against a Pistons team with the third-highest defensive...