Players the Los Angeles Lakers should have kept:
Letting Julius Randle go in 2018 –
Ok, here is where many are going to argue about how they didn’t have the money to re-sign him and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, you always re-sign a guy like Randle. After all, they had drafted him seventh overall in 2014.
Sure, he may have been raw but just look how he turned out. Randle had a ton of talent and has only gotten better each and every season. He could have been an integral part of the team as well as a Laker for a long time.
However, I guess you have got to sacrifice things in life to get others or as the Rolling Stones once put it, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might find…you get what you need.”
Trading Sasha Vujacic and a 2011 first-round pick to the New Jersey Nets for Joe Smith –
Huh? Look, to be quite fair, the Los Angeles Lakers have had their share of poor drafts. They haven’t exactly always been able to get it right. However, look at this deal closely, will you? They traded Vujacic (whom I loved!) and a first-round pick to the Nets for Joe Smith?
Smith ended up playing how many games for the Lakers? Also, in that 2011 NBA Draft, had the Lakers would have kept that pick, they could have possibly had the chance to draft such players as Jimmy Butler, Bojan Bogdanovic, E’Twaun Moore or Isiah Thomas.