Los Angeles Lakers
Basketball fans tend to be a superstitious bunch. I think Lakers fans take it to another level. You earn that crown-fitted jersey sweatband somehow. Through seven decades of the most showboating basketball player’s have ever put on a court. 17 championships. Kareem, Magic, Shaq, Kobe, LeBron. It’s not a team people casually end up rooting for. You grow into it, or you pick it consciously, or it bites you when you’re young and it never really lets go.
Giving a Laker fan something special is easy. They aren’t high maintenance. Oh no, it’s the complete opposite. Quite simply, they’ve already purchased everything obvious themselves.
That’s the challenge we wanted to tackle. The game worn jersey is never going to wow someone who spent the 1988-90 seasons living and dying in front of a pension-sized television. Neither will that coffee mug with the team logo that popped up on the first page of your google search. No shoulder jewelled Lakers fan is going to fall over themselves for something that shows you didn’t put any thought into it.
But they will recognise when somebody who has. And that’s whom we picked these gifts for. The buddy that stayed up with you to watch Game 7 of the 2020 bubble Finals. The family member who can still recount Shipping Days as if it were yesterday. The person who will undoubtedly notice whether or not the person buying them a gift actually cares about this team, or just Googled ‘popular Laker gifts’.
We wanted articles that had to earn their place on this list. Things with some gravitas. Items that match the history and importance of the greatest franchise in sports history.
Some of our selections celebrate the former. Some are about representing properly and not just loudly. Every single one of them would pass our ultimate test. Would we trust this gift enough to give it to someone we liked? If the answer was maybe we didn’t grab it. What we ended up with might be small, but these are pieces we know Lakers fans will appreciate.