Los Angeles Lakers: Did Kawhi Leonard hoodwink them?

Did the Los Angeles Lakers get hoodwinked by Kawhi Leonard this summer in free agency?

Were the Los Angeles Lakers wrong and/or naive in waiting on Kawhi Leonard? On July 5, it was reported that the two-time NBA Finals MVP had agreed to a deal with the Los Angeles Clippers, just after they had acquired Paul George from the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Let’s go back exactly one year. Lakers Nation was stoked because LeBron James had just agreed to take his talents to Venice Beach and play for the purple and gold. It looked like the Lakers were finally back after missing the playoffs for an unprecedented five straight seasons.

Now the challenge was to build a championship team around him – ASAP. Then-President of Basketball Operations, Magic Johnson, and Rob Pelinka made some questionable signings and explained that they not only wanted multiple playmakers to take that load off of LeBron, but they also wanted feisty guys like Rajon Rondo and Lance Stephenson. Sounded logical, except that they didn’t address the team’s lack of outside shooting.

Johnson and Pelinka also made it clear that this would be a two-year process, and that the final step of that process would be finding a co-star to pair with the self-proclaimed King.

At the same time, Kawhi Leonard, who was also in consideration among experts as being arguably the best player in the game, badly wanted out of San Antonio, and rumor had it the SoCal native wanted to be traded to the Lakers.

Supposedly the purple and gold tried to trade for him, but Gregg Popovich, the head coach and president of the Spurs, didn’t seem to have any intention of dealing with the Lakers in good faith.

So instead Leonard was traded to the Raptors, the 2018-19 season began, and it turned into a disaster for the Lakers. All the while, media reports keep saying that Leonard was leaning towards signing with the Clippers this summer as a free agent, with virtually no mention of the Lakers being a possible destination.

Which is why some of us were pleasantly surprised when it was recently reported that Leonard was strongly considering the Lakers as well. I have to admit that right before free agency started, for a minute I felt like something big may have been brewing in Lakers Land.

Well, maybe those reports were BS. He’s headed to the Clippers after a protracted process in which he reportedly met with the Lakers multiple times, as well as with Magic Johnson separately.

When Leonard met with Johnson, he reportedly asked him about the dysfunction in the Lakers front office, and now it seems that the fact that info about that meeting was leaked may have nudged the superstar forward into the arms of the Clippers.

Or maybe not. Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN said that the Clippers had been the “focus during this whole process” for Leonard and that he was simply waiting for them to augment their roster so that his arrival would make them a championship-caliber squad.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but maybe Pelinka, Jeanie Buss and the rest of the Lakers’ front office should have seen this coming all along. Maybe Leonard was thinking Clippers and Clippers only for months. Is it possible he strung this out to weaken the Lakers as they looked to fill out their team?

Leonard may be an enigma since he’s so low-key and doesn’t market or promote himself at all, but the subtle clues were there. As the Lakers waited on him, numerous high-quality role players and complementary players that they could’ve focused on instead went off the market one by one.

This is the downside of hiring a newbie like Rob Pelinka to be the sole man running your basketball operations.

Jerry West (who is now the Clippers GM and deserves a ton of credit for pulling this off) wanted to return to the Lakers shortly after Johnson and Pelinka were brought on board in early 2017, but Buss told him to fuhgeddaboutit. They also could’ve, at least conceivably, kept former GM Mitch Kupchak around in some sort of senior advisor role, but instead they sent him packing along with Jim Buss, their previous President of Basketball Operations.

As a former agent, and an attorney before that, Pelinka is probably both smart and shrewd, which means you’d think he’d know when he’s getting played. But since he was an agent and not an honest one at that, he is reportedly despised around the league, and more than one journalist has said that many other executives won’t even take his phone calls.

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Could the Lakers have prevented this if they had a GM or someone else in the front office who was actually respected around the association, the way that West or even Kupchak was? Someone like that, who was better connected to other executives, owners and agents, may have been able to ascertain enough intel to know when to walk away from the proverbial negotiation table, instead of going for broke and getting left high and dry.

As it turns out, the Lakers will probably be fine. They acquired Anthony Davis, arguably the NBA’s best big man at the young age of 26, for a soft, injury-prone and non-jump shot-making Lonzo Ball, a talented but somewhat injury-prone Brandon Ingram, a solid but somewhat injury-prone role player in Josh Hart and three first-round draft picks that may or may not yield the Pelicans at least one useful player.

They also still have Kyle Kuzma, and they moved quickly to sign Danny Green, one of the league’s best two-way players and Leonard’s former teammate, as well as JaVale McGee, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Jared Dudley and Troy Daniels. It doesn’t exactly hurt that Green and McGee each possess two world championship rings.

With the moves they have made, they should at least be neck-and-neck with the Clippers for Western Conference supremacy next season.

But the apparent lack of astuteness on the part of the Lakers’ front office is troubling. People who get hoodwinked never quite win in business and the NBA is a business after all.