Sports / The Lakers opened their first season without LeBron James with nine new players, a new centerpiece and a question nobody could answer in October: what does this team actually look like? On Wednesday night at Crypto.com Arena it looked like this — Luka Doncic running the show, Walker Kessler dunking everything in sight without missing once, and a 36-16 third quarter that turned Stephen Curry's 18th season opener into a 127-105 rout.
Walker Kessler's Lakers debut is the kind of first night front offices dream about and almost never get. The 7-foot-2 center scored 26 points on perfect 12-for-12 shooting, grabbed nine rebounds and threw down 10 dunks on Wednesday, October 21, as the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors 127-105 at Crypto.com Arena in the season opener for both teams, according to Reuters and the Associated Press. Luka Doncic, playing his first competitive game since April 2, led Los Angeles with 28 points, eight rebounds and seven assists in three quarters. Austin Reaves added 23. Stephen Curry scored 23 for Golden State, 20 of them in the first half, and then watched the fourth quarter from the bench with the game long gone.
A perfect night, and a place in Lakers history
Start with the number that will follow Kessler around all season: 12-for-12. The Associated Press reported that his 12 made shots without a miss were the second-most in Lakers franchise history, trailing only Wilt Chamberlain's 14-for-14 night in March 1969. Read that again. A player who, according to the AP, had not played a competitive game since last Halloween because of injury, who was acquired from Utah in a trade that cost Los Angeles what the AP called "a bounty of draft capital" specifically because Doncic wanted a top center to play with, stepped onto the floor for his new team and did something only Wilt Chamberlain has done better in the 79-year history of the franchise.
The dunks tell the same story in a different language. Kessler finished 10 of his 12 baskets at the rim as dunks. The New York Post, citing ESPN, reported that total was the most by a Laker since Shaquille O'Neal in 2003, and the most by any player in the league's play-by-play era, which dates to 1996-97. And the very first play of the Lakers' season was a preview: Doncic drove, drew the defense, and lobbed it to Kessler for an alley-oop. The AP noted he "never slowed down" from there, repeatedly finishing his teammates' passes while the Lakers rolled away. This was not a center feasting on garbage time. It was the offense, working exactly as designed, against a division rival, on opening night.
How the game broke open
For one quarter, this was the duel everyone bought tickets for. Golden State led nothing and trailed by only one, 34-33, after the first, and Curry was the reason: Reuters reported he scored 16 of the Warriors' first 21 points, hot enough to answer the obvious question about the ankle he tweaked in an open practice last week. If the Warriors' new five-out system was supposed to free him, the early evidence was encouraging — the New York Post noted Golden State moved the ball crisply with Curry on the floor, piling up assists and turning it over just once in the opening period.
Then the game tilted, in two stages. Los Angeles closed the second quarter with a 17-4 run, shot 63.2 percent from the field in the half, and took a 66-52 lead into the locker room. The exclamation point was pure Doncic theatre: guarded most of the half by Warriors rookie Yaxel Lendeborg, with the two exchanging words throughout, Doncic capped his 23-point first half by banking in a shot from near halfcourt at the buzzer — and, the AP reported, gleefully pointing at the fuming rookie, who had picked up a technical foul late in the second quarter after their exchanges. Lendeborg still finished his debut, as the 11th overall pick, with a respectable 12 points.
The third quarter ended the argument. Los Angeles outscored Golden State 36-16, held Curry to three points after his 20-point first half, and pushed the lead to 90-61 on a Reaves 3-pointer with 4:31 left in the period. The Lakers led 102-68 entering the fourth — a 34-point margin — and Curry sat out the entire final quarter. Golden State's supporting numbers explain the collapse as much as the stars do: the Warriors shot 37-for-91 overall and just 8-for-36 from three, and their 16 turnovers became 25 Lakers points, per the Post's account. Brandon Williams led the Warriors' bench with 14 points; Gui Santos matched Lendeborg with 12, and Gary Payton II added 10.
Why this matters
One game in October proves almost nothing, and this section will not pretend otherwise. But opening night was the first real evidence in the central argument about this Lakers season, and the evidence pointed one way. The Lakers opened with nine new players, per Reuters, after four-time MVP LeBron James left as a free agent to join the Philadelphia 76ers. That is not a retool; it is a regime change. The question hanging over it was whether a team built quickly around Doncic — a superstar whose brilliance has never needed much help scoring, but whose teams have always lived or died on whether the pieces around him fit — could look like a team, rather than a collection of arrivals, from night one.
Wednesday's answer was emphatic, and it was emphatic in the specific area the franchise bet its draft capital on. The Doncic-Kessler pairing is the structural idea of this roster: a pick-and-roll engine where the guard bends the defense and the center finishes everything. Kessler's line — 26 points, zero misses, 10 dunks — is what that idea looks like when it works perfectly. Just as important is what surrounded it: Reaves, the holdover, scoring 23 as a genuine second creator rather than a spectator, and contributions from Jake LaRavia and Quentin Grimes, who had 10 apiece per Reuters. Depth and fit, not just star power, produced a 36-16 quarter against a Steve Kerr team.
For Golden State, the honest reading is narrower than the scoreline. The Warriors were missing a small rotation's worth of players: starting guard Brandin Podziemski (lower back soreness) and center Charles Bassey (knee tendinitis) were out, and so were Moses Moody, Jimmy Butler and Kristaps Porzingis — with Moody and Butler not expected back until January as they recover from knee injuries, and Porzingis out indefinitely with a health issue, according to Reuters. The AP added that new Laker Collin Sexton (calf) and first-round pick Cameron Carr (oblique) also missed the game, and LaRavia left the court limping in the fourth quarter — the one shadow on the Lakers' night, and a detail worth watching before Friday. A 22-point loss with that injury list is a bad night, not a verdict. But the pattern the Post identified — efficient with Curry on the floor, lost for playmaking when he sits — is exactly the weakness a thin, injury-hit roster cannot hide, and it showed up on night one.
What the numbers actually say
Put the headline figures in context and the night gets stranger, not more normal. Perfect shooting nights on volume are vanishingly rare: Kessler's 12-for-12 is, per StatMuse figures carried by theScore, the most points ever scored in a season opener without a missed field goal. His 10 dunks are a play-by-play-era record for a single game. And he did it, the AP emphasised, in his first competitive action in almost a year. Regression is coming — nobody shoots 100 percent in this league, and opponents will scheme for the lob by Friday — but records set against a healthy Curry-led rival in a one-point game after one quarter are not flukes of scheduling. They are a statement about a pairing.
The quarter splits carry a quieter warning for Golden State. The Warriors actually won the fourth quarter 37-25, long after the benches emptied, which flatters the final margin; the middle two quarters, played by the rotations that matter, went 68-35 to Los Angeles. Curry's split — 20 points before halftime, three in the decisive third, zero minutes in the fourth — is the game in miniature: the Warriors' 37-year-old engine started his 18th season looking like himself, and it still was not close to enough once the Lakers' size and depth engaged.
What happens next
Both teams play again on Friday, and both get an immediate measuring stick. The Lakers host the Clippers — an intracity game that will test whether Kessler's lob threat warps a defense that has had two days to scout it, and whether LaRavia's limp was anything serious. The Warriors host Memphis, likely still short-handed, needing the non-Curry minutes to look survivable. Beyond Friday, the real questions are the slow ones: whether Kessler's finishing holds up against starting centers who game-plan for him, whether Golden State's January returns arrive in time to matter in a crowded West, and whether a nine-new-player roster can keep opening night's cohesion when the schedule turns. For one night, though, the post-LeBron Lakers did not look like a team in transition. They looked like a team with a plan — and a center who did not miss.
Sources
Reuters / Field Level Media, "Luka Doncic, Lakers open with dominant win vs. Stephen Curry, Warriors" (October 22, 2026). Associated Press game report via theScore, "Kessler goes 12-for-12 in 1st game as Lakers dunk on Warriors" (October 21-22, 2026). New York Post, "Lakers' Big 3 dominates in season-opening win over Warriors" and "Steph Curry can't save Warriors from familiar disaster in Lakers blowout" (October 22, 2026). Related on Signal Post News: Curry's Warriors extension and the WNBA Finals Game 3 ejection.