Dwyane Wade on the Lakers: “They have to make it work”

And we are back at “the Lakers are great on paper” discussion.

Dwyane Wade is all over your television, radio and Internet this week as he does the tour for his book, “A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball.”

And wherever he lands there are some pretty standard basketball questions so far: About winning the title, comparing it to 2006, challenges to repeating, Jeremy Lin….

And the Los Angeles Lakers. The team that added Dwight Howard and Steve Nash to Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol. The team that looks like it could be a threat to a Heat repeat.

Here is what Wade told Fox Sports about the Lakers.

“They’ll be great, but they have to make it work,” Wade said with a tone that sounded something like a warning -- perhaps because he’s speaking from experience. “Some people figure it out right away, some people take till mid-season to figure it out and some take until the next year if they figure it out. Obviously for them, they need to be successful as they want to be, they’re going to have to do it right away.”

That’s the conventional wisdom now, the question is how long it takes them to get it together. Something hampered a little by the fact Howard is expected to miss training camp and maybe the start of the season as he recovers from back surgery. And that they are installing a new offense.

It’s safe to say that the Lakers in March should be better than the Lakers in November. The question we have yet to have answered is how good they will be in June.