The Lakers return exactly one starter from a bad team. The Celtics and Heat and other teams that made these kind of power moves had to scrape together what they could in MLE and vet min signings.

Williams and Harrell were the two best bench players in the league last year and finished games (Williams in particular). Beverley started and took tough defensive assignments. Zubac is an average starting center with some room to grow. Shamet was a pleasant surprised and started games for them; he's also still very much improving. Basically right there you've got five of their top seven guys from last year on a team that made the playoffs in the West. Gallo was trash in the playoffs. Only real loss is SAG but they have depth at the position between Williams and Beverley. That's pretty good to me when you add the Finals MVP and a league MVP finalist.