Lance Stephenson is your prototypical NBA journeyman. After spending the first four years of his career with the Indiana Pacers, the 6-foot-6 shooting guard bounced around the league for quite a bit. This included no less than eight different teams in his 10-year career. One of them happened to be the Los Angeles Lakers.

According to Stephenson himself, his lone year playing alongside LeBron James and the Lakers was the closest he got to potentially winning an NBA championship. This was during the 2018-19, which incidentally, was LeBron's first year in Hollywood. Unfortunately for them, injuries got in the way:

“LeBron got hurt that year with his groin, [Kyle] Kuzma got hurt,” Stephenson told Bally Sports' NBA Insider Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson at the And 1 Open 1 at Kingdome in Harlem, New York City. “A lot of guys got hurt that year. I feel like we would've won it that year.”

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LeBron's debut season with the Lakers was cut short by injury. He ended up playing just 55 games that year, which at that point, was the least number of games he had played throughout his career. As Stephenson said, Kyle Kuzma also got hurt that year, but this was already during the latter part of the season, and the Lakers were virtually out of the playoff race at that point.

Be that as it may, Stephenson is adamant that had it not been for their bad luck with injuries, the Lakers would have won it all that season. For what it's worth, they would have needed to go through the Kevin Durant iteration of the Golden State Warriors in the West and Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors in the NBA Finals. At this point, this is just going to be one of the biggest what-ifs in Lakers franchise history — at least in the mind of Lance Stephenson.