The Warriors hadn’t lost yet. In fact, they had reeled off 14 straight wins on their way to 73. Steve Kerr was still recovering from back surgery and Luke Walton was acting head coach, well-liked but a little bit of a joke: Bill Walton’s son, a curly-haired driftwood plank swept to a pair of championships by Kobe Bryant’s crashing wave, got to beam from the sidelines as this perfect, beautiful, self-motivating basketball team lanced through the league. The guy is, as Jadakiss once boasted, good just waking up.

Title aside, Walton’s ability to actually coach the Dubs, to help them along in any discernible way, was at this point largely theoretical. What value can you add when put in charge of a group of staggeringly talented players who already have an established way of doing things and vanquish most of their opponents by the midpoint of the third quarter? The gig must have involved a lot of slightly flummoxed rah-rahing, a lot of self-consciously bland encouragement. Good job, good job, keep it up.

As it turned out, the Warriors needed Luke Walton, specifically, when they were knackered and grim at the start of a late-November game in Denver. They somnambulated through the contest’s opening minutes, looking uninvested in their labor, regarding the Nuggets less as a foe than an inconvenient obligation keeping them from dinner. Sensing this, Walton pulled the team in close during a timeout and scolded them, in his kind way: guys, where’s the joy? The Warriors ended the quarter up by 11 and eventually won by 13.

This is basically the beginning and end of the notable history of Walton’s fill-in tenure in Oakland, one morsel of hippie wisdom delivered at the correct time. Surely there was other stuff he did with the Warriors, colleagues who spoke highly of him, convincing stratagems laid out in his job interview with the Lakers that made Mitch Kupchak hire him, but if you’re bringing Luke Walton on board, you know upfront that you’re getting a quintessentially laidback Californian with a holistic basketball ideology who values fun and understands the game as a vehicle for it. Which is to say Luke Walton is precisely what the Lakers required after Byron Scott’s dour, blinkered troglodyte reign. They required someone who knew what he was doing, really, and was so enlightened as to grasp the utility of the three-point shot, but just as crucially, someone who would communicate with players on a human level and crack a damn smile every so often.

In the dismal aftermath of Kobe’s farewell tour, which started out charmingly farcical and ended as an Americanized Foundation Pit reboot, any old halfway competent squad would have been fine, but these Baby Lakers, under Walton’s stewardship, are a revelation. What Scott didn’t get, Walton has already internalized. He has a steady hand with D’Angelo Russell, who is the sort of player who needs his coach’s confidence in order to excel. He’s either going to become a ball-dominant star or a disappointment but the route to both destinations is going to be craggy and painful. Walton’s at peace with that, doesn’t screw up his face and hook the second-year guard when he careers into the paint without a plan and fumbles the ball past the baseline. He knows that if Russell isn’t allowed to make mistakes now, he won’t ever realize his potential. 

Julius Randle’s greatest strengths are his athleticism and his polish around the basket, so Walton has occasionally stuck him at center and told him to beat more cumbersome big men down the floor. Brandon Ingram has an expansive breadth of ability but he isn’t yet great at any one thing. Walton’s pointing him in a single direction, for now, placing him on toughest available defensive assignment duty. He’s challenging the rookie without overwhelming him. The other aspects of Ingram’s game will develop in time. Beyond that, Nick Young has his feet on the ground for the first time in years, Jordan Clarkson and Lou Williams are combo guarding it up with aplomb, and the defense is quite good: buzzy and sharp and purposeful.

It’s still early. This could fall apart. Something as charmingly corny as Metta World Peace proclaiming I love basketball! after canning a free throw could be cited in gleeful schadenfreude down the line. Remember when they loved basketball? Before D’Angelo Russell’s career became a Worst of Westbrook mixtape? We weren’t sure Luke Walton was competent back when the Warriors were mostly doing what they could have done by themselves and we’re not sure now, seven games into a six-month season, but there is a radiance about these Lakers at the outset of the franchise’s new, uncertain era. That’s something we can safely attribute to Walton, who understands that players are at their best when they’ve struck a balance between happiness and hard work, between feeling prepared and feeling empowered to express themselves. There is more to good coaching than that and the most contented teams aren’t always the greatest ones, but it is, at least, an excellent place from which to start.