Can National TV Please Stop Showing The Horrible Los Angeles Lakers?

By Kareem Gantt on October 31, 2014

The Los Angeles Lakers opened the 2014-15 season with two nationally televised games, one at home to the Houston Rockets, and the second at the Phoenix Suns. Guess how both of those games turned out? If you guessed a Laker rout, then you are correct.

Long before the season tipped off, I said that the Lakers were not going to be a good team this season. It didn’t matter if Kobe Bryant was coming back, the roster surrounding the aging superstar was neither very talented nor good.

So why on God’s green earth do TV networks believe that fans would actually want to witness the carnage that is the Lakers most of the season? Let’s take a snapshot view of this roster.

Jeremy Lin was a decent free agent pick-up, but he was not going to be the player that would transform the Lakers from an also-ran into a Western Conference contender. The same goes for Carlos Boozer, to whom the Chicago Bulls were happy to wave goodbye.

The Lakers that Laker fans and the nation witnessed in the first two games of the season was the same team I was referring to almost two months ago, a listless team with an aging superstar with limited help around him.

In other words, the Lakers are going to stink this year, so it makes absolutely no sense why the Lakers are on national television so much. Tonight will mark the third straight time the Lakers will be on TV, this time against the much more potent Los Angeles Clippers.

Do you want to watch another blowout? Me neither. So until the Lakers get better, let’s treat them like the Minnesota Timberwolves and ban them from national television.

Kareem Gantt is an NBA Featured Writer for Rant Sports. For more from this author, ‘follow’ him on Twitter, ‘like’ him on Facebook, and ‘add’ him to your network on Google.