Podcast: The Frank Vogel introductory press conference epitomized the Lakers’ dysfunction

Thanks to the Los Angeles Lakers just outright refusing to even consider a nice, quiet offseason, our podcasts have plenty to talk about as the rest of the NBA prepares for the NBA Finals, which start next week. Today’s shows further discuss Magic Johnson going scorched earth on the franchise, Rob Pelinka responding and Frank Vogel being there for all of it.

Silver Screen & Roll Podcast

On today’s crossover episode, I was joined by Sasha Ashall, who usually hosts “I Love Basketball” alongside Sabreena Merchant. We start the episode by debating whether it’s smart to fight cats. I’m still on team “a cat would mess you up,” but Sasha is out here challenging our boss’ cat. That’s a power move I can respect.

Honestly, as soon as we focused our attention on the Lakers, I missed talking about cats. Don’t tell anyone, though.

We start, though, with Magic Johnson’s wild ride on ESPN’s “First Take.” Sasha took notes while she watched it, so of course we started with the note that read simply, “Smh lmfao.”

But as much fun as it was to laugh at Johnson talking himself into knots, we did want to spend some time talking about Frank Vogel, who said all the right things but went mostly unnoticed thanks to Magic’s antics and the Lakers isolating themselves as they have over the last month.

Vogel said some fascinating things about touring the league, offensives schematics, shot-type prioritization and more, but most everyone listening at the time was thinking ahead to whatever the next questions about the front office might be. I make the case that this basically summarizes where the Lakers have been, really, since Jeanie Buss hired Magic in the first place.

Lastly, we spend time on how the Lakers have handled their hiring of Jason Kidd, and how bad a look it was for Pelinka and the rest of the front office to have Vogel answer for their hire.

Listen below for our entire conversation and, for more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

Locked on Lakers

On today’s episode, I opened up the mailbag to get to questions I wasn’t able to answer on Monday’s show. There were quite a few and some really good ones, but a theme did just kind of organically present itself: Managing expectations.

Basically, things can technically work out, but getting your hopes up at this point for anything having to do with the Lakers probably isn’t the wisest move here.

You can listen to the entire episode below, and make sure to subscribe on iTunes, where you can also leave questions in the form of a five-star review to guarantee your topic makes the show.