Picture this: You’re an unhappy cornerstone of your franchise and you’re unhappy with your current contract. Problem is, you’re health and age have come into question in recent years and are hurting the leverage you hope to have against one of the greatest negotiators the NBA has ever seen – Pat Riley.
Your name at this point would be Dwyane Wade, and he’s reportedly doing what all free agents do to freak out their respective organziations: threaten to join the Los Angeles Lakers.
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This, via Bleacher Report’s Ethan J. Skolnick in a series of tweets regarding Wade’s impending contractual negotiations:
.... (6th) Finally, if Wade went anywhere, at any point, I've typically heard L.A. as an option. But I still expect Heat to sort this out.
— Ethan J. Skolnick, 5 Reasons Sports (@EthanJSkolnick) May 28, 2015
Here’s the issue, though: Wade makes less than no sense for the Lakers. He’s old, rarely healthy and plays the same position as another old and rarely healthy superstar: Kobe Bryant. The Lakers stand to have about $22 million in cap space this summer and Wade is reportedly unhappy with the $16 million he stands to make.
Um, he wants more than that?
Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak has been pretty adamant about the type of rebuild he foresees. No, he doesn’t expect to mimic the Philatankia Seventy-tankers with repeated trips to the top of the lottery, but he also doesn’t want to try to expedite the process at the risk of damning it altogether. Signing Wade would be the latter course.
We’re still roughly a month away from when free agents like Wade start making actual decisions, so expect to see innumerable other rumors of “Free Agent X” wants to be a Laker. Who wouldn’t want to be?
Let’s just get to the draft already, so we can parse through the aforementioned rumors with some type of direction and purpose.
Next: Lakers Draft: Mitch Kupchak Addresses Draft Night Strategy