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The middle three games of Oklahoma City's five-game win in the Western Conference semifinals were all close, and with better crunch-time execution, the Lakers could have won all three and be headed home for a chance to close the deal in Game 6.

But that's the wrong way to look at things, and the Lakers know it internally. The other two games were Oklahoma City runaways, and mixing blowout losses with down-to-the-wire contests is no way to win a playoff series. Luck, fatigue and randomness will inevitably swing a crunch-time game or two against you, and given the taxing load that the Lakers' three best players carried all season, fatigue surely played a role in late collapses during Game 2 and Game 4 -- the latter forever known as the game in which Kobe Bryant went completely off the rails, and then threw a long-tenured champion teammate under the bus.

This team was never a real championship contender. The Lakers had the sixth-best point differential among Western Conference teams, and they just couldn't function as an elite club on both ends of the floor. They struggled to score in the first half of the season, checking in as a league-average offense. The March trade for point guard Ramon Sessions goosed the offense, but the defense collapsed over the final 20 games, surrendering points at a rate that would have made it the NBA's worst for the full season. Sessions, among the worst defenders in the league for his position, didn't help, but he alone cannot explain a team playing top-10 level defense for half a season and then hemorrhaging points like the Bobcats for 20 games, plus the playoffs.

The Lakers were just never that good, and their top three pieces don't mesh as well as they used to, given the lack of talent and outside shooting around them. According to NBA.com's stats tool, the Lakers outscored opponents by only 2.8 points per 100 possessions with Bryant, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum on the floor together. That's a very low number for a star-studded trio on a decent team. And when you scan the team's lineup data, what jumps out is the fact that no combination of two, three or four players did much to transform the Lakers. Most teams have duos or trios that result in dramatically improved (or worsened) play on one or both ends of the floor, but the numbers for every relevant Lakers combination basically hover around the same "good but not good enough" area, indicating that the foundation here is rotten.

The Lakers now have to ask if the Bryant/Gasol/Bynum trio is inherently limited because of Bryant's declining skills, Gasol's masquerading as L.A.'s Brandon Bass and Bynum's now-and-then effort issues, or if that core would work better if the Lakers nail a couple of transactions on the fringes. They need shooting and speed -- wow, do they need speed -- in addition to finding a way to convince Bryant that he does not need the ball all of the time on the perimeter. The Sessions trade was supposed to help that process along; it ultimately failed.

In short: We have two seasons' worth of evidence now suggesting that this team is not a real contender -- not with the Thunder still growing, the Spurs sustaining greatness and teams in Denver, Memphis and the other one at Staples Center rising around the Lakers.

The question now is how to change that. Any prescription must begin with the sobering reality that the collective bargaining agreement offers the Lakers almost nothing with which to work. Acquiring a meaningful free agent will be very difficult, which means the Lakers will almost inevitably have to trade either Gasol or Bynum to upgrade the roster around Bryant. Salvation isn't coming via the draft, either, because the Lakers traded their 2012 first-round pick to the Cavaliers for Sessions and sent a future first-round pick -- which was acquired from Dallas in the Lamar Odom deal -- to Houston in the Derek Fisher trade. They also gave Cleveland, which has its own first-round pick as well as Miami's in the 2013 draft, the right to swap any of its picks with the Lakers' selection next year. That's a nice little get for the Cavs, who will almost surely jump up a half-dozen or so draft spots because they can send the Heat's pick to the Lakers.