The Los Angeles Lakers had a bad playoffs start losing Game 1 of the first round at home with the New Orleans Hornets, they have and even worse end getting swept by the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference semifinals.

In these strange playoffs we saw the shadow of the team that won the last two NBA titles and still after the All Star Game seemed ready to try again to reach the final victory, also because Andrew Bynum looked for a once in fairly good physical conditions.

In recent years the Lakers demonstrated their ability to win close games, against the Dallas Mavericks they threw them away. The Californian team lost Game 1 96-94 playing bad the final minutes. In Game 2 the Mavericks had a small lead at the end of the third quarter and won 93-81. In Game 3 the Lakers were ahead at the end of the third quarter but they threw it away and lost it 98-92. In Game 4 many players no longer believed it and the result was a humiliating 122-86 defeat.

The Lakers could be easily ahead 2-1 in the series after 3 games and of course Game 4 would’ve been completely different. The Lakers negative transformation was the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind, how is that possible?

It’s true that the players average age is high but a collapse of that type was really unpredictable and at times it seemed more mental than physical. It would be easy to take Pau Gasol as a scapegoat because his performance decline was the most evident. There are several rumors concerning the nature of his problems: some say he’s suffering from respiratory problem, others say that he has love problems. However he wasn’t the only player who played sub-par. Have someone won enough and didn’t feel like fighting for more titles?

What future awaits the Los Angeles Lakers? It was known for some time that most likely their coach Phil Jackson would retire at the end of this season but obviously he hoped to end his career with the twelfth title won as a coach, the sixth with the Lakers. Unless the bad end of these playoffs doesn’t make him change his mind the first candidate as head coach is Brian Shaw, who came to the Lakers as a player and stayed as an assistant coach. Obviously his value as head coach is to be seen.

What to do with the players? The temptation to change is big but how? As long as Kobe Bryant wants to play it’s worth to try to win the title. The ideal is to have again the Pau Gasol who’s been instrumental in winning the two titles of recent years.

The situation in the position of playmaker is delicate: Derek Fisher has been crucial for the past five titles won by the Lakers and he still scored decisive points in the last two finals but he’s one of the oldest players and inevitably he’s going towards the end of his career. Finding a new high-level starting playmeker however is difficult: ideally the Lakers might try to arrange a trade to bring to Los Angeles Chris Paul or Deron Williams but it’s obviously hard and we’re talking about players with big contracts. Fisher could remain for the moment as a replacement and in the future he could join the coaching staff: after all on several occasions he was the one talking to his teammates in time out.

In general the Lakers should keep the players who still want to fight for the title to see if next year they can still reach victory or if the future belongs to younger players. I don’t envy the Lakers management, which has a very complicated task.