Who's Really to Blame for Los Angeles Lakers' Early 2025 NBA Playoffs Exit?

After a wild NBA season that saw the Los Angeles Lakers start slow, add Luka Dončić and eventually surge to 50 wins and the West's third seed, they were eliminated by the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday.

Behind a monster 27-point, 24-rebound performance from Rudy Gobert, Minnesota won 103-96 on the road to end the series in just five games.

The T-Wolves are moving on, while the Lakers are now entering their offseason with disappointment and plenty of questions.

Here, we'll take a look at the biggest reasons they're going home early.

At the risk of appearing to pull some punches, it's hard to put a ton of blame on first-year head coach JJ Redick.

His team doesn't have much of a bench. There isn't a single starting-caliber center on the roster. And a lot of the levers he pulled throughout 2024-25 are a big part of why L.A. won 50 games.

But even Redick himself would certainly take some of the blame for losing to a lower-seeded team in the first round.

The heavy minutes load he gave LeBron James and Luka Dončić may have contributed to both looking entirely spent down the stretch in Game 5. Simply allowing the latter to hunt isolations or mismatches for entire possessions may not have been the optimal way to attack.

In Game 5, specifically, basically never playing a big (as bad as L.A.'s are) while Gobert is having the game of his life is something that can be second-guessed.

At the same time, though, there are reasonable counters to all of the above. LeBron's 40, Luka's style has worked for years (plus the team didn't really have time to introduce some new system for him on the fly) and again, there isn't a real option at the 5 on the roster.

Age isn't a person (unless there's a myth I'm unfamiliar with), but it certainly deserves its fair share of blame for this.

LeBron is 40. He's played over 71,000 regular and postseason minutes. He's been playing NBA basketball since he was a teenager.

A man with that much mileage on his body, quite frankly, shouldn't be able to play anymore (let alone play at his level).

And while LeBron is, for the most part, defying that logic—he averaged 25.4 points, 9.0 rebounds and 5.6 assist in this series—age showed up in a big way in fourth quarters.

Down the stretch of Game 5, he looked completely gassed. He was settling for threes (and his team followed suit). And it was like you could actually see the entire team sputtering on empty, like a car pulling off the highway.

His teammates don't necessarily have this excuse (though the minutes load probably didn't help), but age was absolutely a factor for LeBron.

On balance, this season was a massive win for Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka and the rest of his front office.

He made perhaps the greatest trade of all time in swindling the Dallas Mavericks out of Luka Dončić and supercharged the next 10 years of Lakers basketball.

When that move was made, L.A. went from a team that looked poised to chase mediocrity for the foreseeable future to one with a perennial MVP candidate who's made several of his team's fringe title threats.

If we're just talking about this season, though, Pelinka has to shoulder some of the blame for the early exit. There isn't a starting center on the roster.

And while the GM may stand by his team rescinding the Mark Williams trade, the Charlotte Hornets center played most of his team's games after the trade deadline and averaged 14.9 points, 10.8 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.3 blocks.

The 23-year-old certainly would have helped more in this series than Dalton Knecht, who spent all of it on the bench.

Others sitting next to him didn't help much against Minnesota, either. And while other coaches may have trusted players such as Jarred Vanderbilt or Gabe Vincent more than Redick did, they certainly don't inspire a ton of confidence.

Not having more players who are clearly ready to contribute right now falls on Pelinka.

This is another slide that comes with a lot of caveats.

Luka spent much of this season nursing a calf injury. He had to get through the shock of being involved in a megatrade he didn't expect. There was little time to acclimate to his new team, teammates and situation. And in Wednesday's Game 5, he appeared to injure his back toward the end of the first half (though he played most of the second).

As L.A. ages into its Luka era, though, it may have to reevaluate how the new face of the franchise plays.

It's natural to just give him the ball and let him cook. That's led to plenty of strong offenses over the years. But that ultra-heliocentric style also hasn't led to a lot of postseason success over the years.

Think back on the highest-volume scorers and playmakers in recent history. Luka, James Harden, maybe even Allen Iverson. None of them have championships (though Dončić did make the Finals last season).

And as fun as those one-man offenses can sometimes be, they come at a cost. They can wear down the star running them. They can slowly disconnect the other players over the course of a season. They're more predictable for opposing defenses.

On the other hand, you can think of plenty of title-winning teams that emphasized ball and player movement, like the 2014-15 Golden State Warriors or 2013-14 San Antonio Spurs.

And the thing is, we do have a little evidence Luka can thrive within that kind of system. Look up video of him playing for Slovenia at EuroBasket 2017. He's capable of playing without the ball. It just has to be part of the system.

Of course, that doesn't mean the Lakers have to abandon isolations and pick-and-rolls entirely. In fact, they shouldn't. Luka's a nightmare to defend in those situations. L.A. can make it even more terrifying by mixing it up and keeping opponents off balance.

Having said all of that, it's clear now that the Lakers simply ran into a better team in the first round.

The seeds may not have reflected that, but net rating certainly did. Minnesota finished the regular season in fourth place in that category (10 spots higher than the Lakers). And though it took a while for wins to follow, they eventually did.

Once the Timberwolves figured out how Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo fit alongside Gobert, Anthony Edwards, Mike Conley and Jaden McDaniels, they started to look like the contender they were for much of last season.

And now they're headed to a second round against either a wildly inexperienced Houston Rockets or the seventh-place Golden State Warriors, it's starting to feel like another conference finals run is in play.