The Los Angeles Lakers are off to an unexpected slow start to the season and with them starting off their treacherous 5 game stretch of games with a loss to the L.A. Clippers Friday night the outlook for the rest of the season is starting to look even grimmer.
The Lakers will play the Denver Nuggets on Sunday at Staples but its gets exponentially harder going forward. They’ll face the surging Houston Rockets on the road on Tuesday and the team with the 3rd best record in the NBA on the 2nd night of a back to back, San Antonio Spurs, on Wednesday. They’ll get one day off before they’ll have to do battle with the #1 team in the NBA, Oklahoma City Thunder, in front of their frenzied home crowd.
The Lakers continue to dig themselves a bigger and bigger hole with every loss. While they are currently just 2 games back from obtaining the last playoff spot, the Lakers aspirations are much higher than just making the playoffs, as always in Lakers Land its about championships. In order for the Lakers to be in the best position possible to make a late run at a ring, they’ll need to obtain a much more favorable position than one at the bottom of the Western Conference playoff bracket.
The Lakers have 50 games remaining in the season. We have calculated the necessary record that the Lakers will need to accomplish in order to reach each of the available 8 seeds in the playoffs based on the projections above.
Based on the projections you can pretty much scratch off the top 3 seeds as being realistically attainable for the Lakers this season.
Even getting home court advantage by obtaining one of the top 4 seeds will be very difficult as the Lakers will need to finish by winning more than 82% of their remaining games which would be better than any team’s current winning percentage.
Realistically, the Lakers have a shot at seeds #5 through #8 which means that the Lakers will not have home court advantage to start the playoffs and outside of a major upset, they will not have home court advantage throughout the playoffs.
The Lakers have dug themselves quite a big hole and they now have a tall task of getting themselves out it.
– Fern Rea “@raining3sdotcom”, “facebook/raining3s”
Raining3s 
One thought on “How Many Wins Are Needed For Lakers to Make the Playoffs? We Project Again”