There’s No Telling What’s Next

“What are the Lakers going to do this year?” asked the man in the barber’s chair.

It’s the question that you hear everywhere, from barbershops to bar stools, chat rooms to coffee shops as Tuesday’s opener draws closer.

Because we have no idea anymore. The short answer, the pretty safe answer, used to be “championship.” Over the last 25 years, even when they didn’t win it, the road to the Larry O’Brien Trophy usually went through Los Angeles. Thirteen of the 17 other champions either beat the Lakers or beat the team that beat the Lakers in the playoffs.

Now we can’t even be sure they’ll be around to have a say in the matter. The prognostications vary. One guy says the Lakers will win 56 games. Another says they won’t make the playoffs. And those are just two opinions within the ESPN media conglomerate.

It’s disorienting. Since the 1979-80 Lakers featuring a rookie named Magic Johnson got me hooked on pro sports, every year I have lived in Los Angeles the Lakers were championship contenders. By the time I left for college in the fall of 1988, the Lakers had made eight trips to the NBA Finals and won five championships.

I was gone for the dark years after Magic’s retirement(s) and during the fun but non-contending “Lake Show” era that followed. By the time I returned to L.A. in 1997, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant had arrived and the Lakers once again were in the discussion. You started every October thinking about June.

Now, as far as the basketball is concerned, they’re just another team.

For the first time in what seems like forever, the Lakers are less about expectations than they are about existentialism.

Existentialism? Well, they’ll need some new type of philosophy to replace Phil Jackson’s Zen ways, so why not the big E? My dictionary defines existentialism as an “analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for his acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad.”

Yep, sounds like Kobe Bryant’s predicament to me.

It’s his squad now, a responsibility he yearned for and now embraces. So we’ll see whether he can choose between the right and wrong way to handle that freedom.

I talked to one ex-Laker (and that’s a growing demographic) who said Bryant is savvy enough to know that he’ll be judged by the team’s wins and losses, not his personal statistics. But he also wondered whether Bryant’s ego would allow him to give up a shot at the scoring title.

The new-look Lakers were most effective when Bryant created open jump shots for his teammates or drove and found Caron Butler cutting to the hoop.

For what it’s worth, Bryant’s two highest scoring outputs of the preseason -- 35-point nights against Seattle and Golden State -- occurred in the only two games the Lakers lost.

But it’s hard to grasp any knowledge based on this preseason. After eight games, we still know very little about this team.

The Lakers are far from their full potential: Vlade Divac, Devean George, Brian Grant, Kareem Rush and Luke Walton either sat out or had limited playing time because of injuries.

As for the competition, the one playoff team they faced -- the Sacramento Kings -- was jet-lagged after returning from China and rested the starters.

But the Lakers can be encouraged by Butler and the active play of center Chris Mihm (on offense and defense).

And when all else fails, the Lakers still have the best perimeter player in the NBA.

Bryant will be the difference in a handful of games just by himself, by coming through in the clutch at a level no other active player can match.

Everyone on the roster feels as if he has something to prove, primarily Bryant. Ironically, if he embraces the team concept, it would only reinforce the point Phil Jackson was trying to make in his book.

“Even though there’s things that are discussed about Kobe, there’s a tremendous amount of support and care and belief that Kobe can turn this around and get it going in the right direction,” Jackson said recently.

Bryant’s ability to do whatever he wants on the basketball court, in addition to having some pretty good teammates by his side, means the Lakers will make the playoffs.

It’s the lack of an interior presence that eliminates this team from the championship discussion. The game is still about shooting near the basket as often as possible.

By trading away Shaquille O’Neal, the Lakers have gone from an inside-out team to an outside-in team. Ask the Dallas Mavericks how that approach worked.

The Lakers don’t have an intimidating last line of defense and might not have the defensive rebounding abilities to ignite the fastbreaks they hope to run.

The Lakers have passion and attitude. They already showed more intensity in the exhibition games than the Lakers showed in the first round of the playoffs last season. In many ways, it will be the most entertaining and intriguing regular season in years.

In the past, the attitude of the team and many fans was: “Wake me when it’s June.”

Sleep that long this year and you’ll miss the show.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.