LOS ANGELES — It’s a strange spot for the Los Angeles Lakers, an almost surreal truth as they enter a new season.

NBA champions a mere two years ago. They’re now in the unfamiliar role of underdogs.

NBA general managers don’t expect much from the Lakers, picking them in an anonymous survey to finish eighth in the 15-team Western Conference. Vegas oddsmakers agree, pegging them to win 45 games, which slots them eighth-best in the West.

“We’re treating this season like we have a chip on our shoulder. We’re the underdogs,” Lakers center-forward Anthony Davis recently told ESPN. “Obviously, the world is looking to see what we do. But... they’re not talking about us, and that’s fine. You know, we’d rather be under the radar.”

Finishing 11th in the West will push you well below the championship horizon. It happened last season when the trio of LeBron James, Davis and Russell Westbrook were either injured or ineffective on the way to a headache-inducing 33-49 record.

The three of them played only 21 games together. The results, an 11-10 record, weren’t overly encouraging.

It all led to the immediate firing of coach Frank Vogel and then a flurry of phone calls from the Lakers’ front office as it tried to peddle the ill-fitting Westbrook to other NBA teams. They haven’t found a suitor yet as Westbrook, 33, enters the final year of a contract paying him $47 million this season.

The Lakers’ regular season begins Tuesday with a game at Golden State. It will be “ring night” for the Warriors, who won the NBA championship in June and will celebrate it again before the game with flashy rings for each player. It serves as a reminder of what the Lakers accomplished not long ago.

Vogel was their coach when James and Anthony created a formidable duo that took home the 2020 NBA championship. The Lakers stumbled after that, going 42-30 the following year with a first-round playoff knockout and then sputtering badly last season without a whiff of the playoffs.

How bad was it? The Lakers barely made it to the finish line last season, going 6-18 after the All-Star break as their defense surrendered a numbingly generous 122 points a game.

Davis missed half the season and James almost one-third of it because of injuries. That obviously didn’t help and contributed to a whopping 41 different starting lineups — or as James called it, “literally half the season.”

Enter new Lakers coach Darvin Ham, who has preached a defense-first philosophy reflecting his rugged game as a player on the 2004 Detroit Pistons team that beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals.

Ham comes with a lengthy list of stops as an assistant coach, including the Lakers for two years a decade ago. Most recently, he was on the sidelines for the Milwaukee Bucks when they won the championship in 2021.

Ham has implored the need to stop other teams with his three-word mantra: “Contain, contest, control.” He’s also hammering home the importance of stopping opposing offenses three times in a row, netting a “kill” in his book.

The Lakers were 21st in defensive rating last season, an alarming drop-off after finishing first and third defensively the previous two seasons.

It didn’t take James long to pinpoint where the Lakers needed to improve the most.

“Defense,” he said. “Teams that can defend and can get stops when needed, they’re just simply more successful in our league.”

The Lakers needed to get tougher, according to VP of Basketball Operations Rob Pelinka, so they traded for feisty point guard Pat Beverley, who calls himself “Mr. 94 Feet” because of his penchant for guarding opposing point guards the entire length of the court. The Lakers also reunited with Dennis Schröder, a similarly spirited point guard who likes to annoy opponents with his defense.

The Lakers won’t get punked as often on the perimeter, but a turnaround from their overly pliant ways remains to be seen.

LA also needs a push on the offensive end. The team struggled from the three-point line last season and finished 22nd in the league behind the arc. They were 26th in the pre-season from three-point range (28.6%) on the way to a 1-5 record.

The good news is James keeps rolling in his 20th (!) NBA season. He will turn 38 in December and, if he remains healthy, pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a few months later as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.

James was a beast last season, averaging 30 points a game, the second-highest mark of his career. But he played 37 minutes a game, the fourth-most in the NBA last season. That number must decrease if the Lakers want to preserve the player they awarded a three-year contract extension to keep him in the fold until July 2026.

James will be joined by a fully motivated Davis, 29, whose championship run in 2020 appeared to smash the injury-bug stereotype that plagued him before joining the Lakers. Then came the last two years, where Davis has missed more games (78) than he’s played (76).

Davis had a monstrous preseason, rediscovered his shooting touch and said he wanted to play all 82 regular-season games. He recently revealed how a wrist injury hurt his outside shot last season. Indeed, he made only 18.6% from three-point range and only 71.3% from the free-throw line because he couldn’t complete the motion of his shot.

“Any time I followed through, it was very painful,” he said. “And I had to try to do that over and over.”

The obvious key to the Lakers’ success will be Westbrook, whose style of play hasn’t meshed with the ball-dominant James. Then again, will Westbrook still be on the team before the Feb. 9 trade deadline?

Teams have tried to pry a future first-round draft pick (or two) from the Lakers that would allow them to unload Westbrook and his weighty contract. But in a press conference a few weeks ago, Pelinka said LA needed to move deliberately.

Because they surrendered so many future draft picks to acquire Davis in 2019, they have only “one shot” to make a big trade, Pelinka added.

So Westbrook remains with the Lakers — for now. He wasn’t overly sharp in preseason and even came off the bench in the Lakers’ exhibition finale last Friday, perhaps an omen of what’s to come in the regular season.

The Lakers couldn’t find suitors for Westbrook but reconfigured their roster in other ways when free agency began in June. Because of the money made by James, Westbrook and Davis, the salary cap-strapped Lakers signed several minimum-salaried players at about $2.5 million each, a small sum compared to the average NBA income of $10.5 million.

Unlike last year, youth was targeted, not veteran experience.

The average age of last year’s free agents was well over 30. Many of them — Trevor Ariza, Kent Bazemore, Wayne Ellington, Dwight Howard, Rajon Rondo and Carmelo Anthony — are no longer in the league.

The average age of the first five free agents signed by the Lakers this year was a robust 25.4 years. The main prize was Lonnie Walker IV, a shooting guard whose scoring average increased each of his first four years in the league in San Antonio. Walker, 23, could easily be an opening-night starter.

The Lakers also added big men Damian Jones and Thomas Bryant, along with high-energy forward Juan Toscano-Anderson. Small forward Troy Brown Jr. averaged 16 minutes as a key rotation player for Chicago last season but has yet to play for the Lakers because of a sore back.

A possible bounce-back story can be found with Kendrick Nunn, 27, who didn’t play last season for the Lakers because of a bone bruise on his knee but was solid in many areas in the preseason.

The new Lakers will have to gel quickly. The schedule doesn’t do them any favors.

Remember last year, when they had 12 of their first 15 games at home, largely against non-playoff teams? That’s over.

LA’s first 10 games are brutal this year, beginning with that season opener at Golden State and continuing with a home game against the Clippers two days later. There are also road games in Denver and Minnesota, plus home games against Denver, New Orleans and Cleveland in the first three weeks. Phew.

Rough start or not, the Lakers hope for a better finish.

“Last year was what it was,” Ham said. “We’re looking out the windshield, not the rear-view mirror. This is a whole new chapter.”

Mike Bresnahan is the Lakers Analyst for Spectrum SportsNet.