Emotions lead to selective attention, amongst a whole slew of other things. People are going to find anything to support their pre-conceived notions, while ignoring anything that creates dissonance (as you mentioned, there are numerous examples of players coming to play in LA *when* the team was contending).

Funniest part to me is that a lot of these dudes follow teams that have been consistently mediocre and put themselves in that position by shelling out long contracts to mid-tier players creating a perpetual cycle of mediocrity. When the Lakers refuse to do that by not making any inflated offers to mid-tier players and instead abide their time in order to get superstars, it's suddenly Kobe's fault and the team is in dissaray. Lol. Management has certainly made some mistakes (Mike Brown over Adelman, D'Antoni, Kobe's contract) but this off-season isn't one of them.