With how great Ball and Ingram were…
Tell me how many games the Pelicans won that year?
Tell me how many LeBrons they had. Hell, tell me how many Kuzmas, and Hunters, and Zubacs, and Greens, and Rondos they had.
Are you really unable to process the concept of a deep team, filled with talented players two-deep at every position?
Again, you are making a lot bad assumptions. There was a lot of pressure on these guys playing with LeBron in LA. They got a fresh start on a bad team where is a lot easier to compile stats.
And there was a lot of pressure on the guys who did play with James in 2020 -- particularly on Davis, who has never exactly been known to handle that well.
Did not matter, because they were loaded with talent, and they'd have been far more loaded without trading for Davis.
While Ball improved his shooting that off season, he was still 56% from the free throw line. You really betting on that guy making big shots in the playoffs?
If he doesn't, there were a raft of other guys who could. You're assuming any other teams were sufficiently good to even keep games enough close to matter, and that's dubious.
The Lakers would have had an excellent collection of centers, the best collection of four forwards, and a bunch of extremely-capable guards. And, oh by the way, James.
And if Ball was so great, tell me why the Pelicans didn’t keep him for themselves? All they got back in the trade was 2 bench guys and a 2nd round pick. If he were anything close to as good as you claim the Pelicans would have resigned him.
This is really all you've got left? You are appealing to the New Orleans Pelicans as the arbiters of talent? If you knew shit from Shinola, you'd be aware that one of the reasons that New Orleans has their history is because they are not very good judges of talent, nor very good at assembling winning teams.
You might also be aware that Chicago, with Ball, was the best team in the League, until he got hurt.
Please consider at least a pause in embarrassing yourself.
Why don’t you poll the other Laker fans and ask them if they think the Lakers would have won in 2020
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is my first rodeo. It is not. I have had this discussion with thousands of Laker fans in the intervening years. Unfortunately, the average Laker fan is not even much more familiar with basketball than you are, so they are also unable to apply any useful critical thought on the matter.
In other words, the huge majority of Laker fans, when presently with this very question, respond similarly to a comment here above -- by mindlessly blathering about how Davis averaged 25.7 points, and completely failing to even consider the whole picture. Not one I've met has even ever considered what the Lakers' roster would have been without the trade, which is only the very beginning of such analysis.
You also seem to share in the prevalent idea on this forum that a question can be answered simply by counting the number of people who believe each answer. To put it mildly, this idea is fantastically stupid, as anyone with even the most mediocre education ought to be aware. For example, in New England, 400 years ago, it was common for a town full of people to convince themselves that a particular person was a witch. They would then murder that person. This did make the person a witch.
Another example is climate change. Depending on which year you poll the populace, you will find wildly different percentages who believe in it, or not. So the majority has been wrong on this, at some point ( they were either wrong years ago, or are wrong now ).
Had you any schooling at all, you might've heard of a man named Galileo. Look him up.
It is very possible, indeed common, for the majority of people to be wrong. There are so many other examples of such that we could probably fill the storage that this site is hosted on describing them all, but I will not do that. If you are curious, you can read almost literally anything -- hypothetically anyway.