Los Angeles Lakers: Constructing the dream offseason

The Los Angeles Lakers roster and how the financials work:

We have 14 players to suit up for the Los Angeles Lakers and that does not include whoever the team picks to be a two-way player. The Lakers would be pretty limited in terms of getting a buyout signing later in the year, and to combat that, the team could make the young player’s deals non-guaranteed.

The starting five after this offseason would look as followed:

• PG: Mike Conley
• SG: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope
• SF: LeBron James
• PF: Anthony Davis
• C: Hassan Whiteside

The bench unit would be:

• 6: Evan Fournier
• 7: Alex Caruso
• 8: Paul Millsap
• 9: Talen Horton-Tucker
• 10: Marc Gasol
• 11: JJ Redick
• 12: Ben McLemore
• 13: Kostas Antetokounmpo
• 14: Devontae Cacok

With the minimum salaries being worth $1.62 million against the cap, these 14 players would account for $131,122,261 in salary. Now, as some may remember, the team is still paying Luol Deng $5 million, which puts them over the luxury tax.

Since the Lakers are conducting a sign-and-trade, they get hard-capped at the luxury tax apron and cannot go over it. While they are $5.5 million under it in this situation, the team also has to account for the $5 million cap hit that Luol Deng still has on the books (this is the last year).

When originally drafting this article, Kyle Lowry was used as the sign-and-trade player as he is a better version of Conley. However, Lowry likely would be worth more and would not take the same paycut as Conley to play on a contender. Lowry has won it all, Conley has not and is worth less as is.

The Lakers would be one roster spot short but that is fine, they have two two-way players that don’t count against the cap that they can bring up if injuries occur.

If Lowry takes a paycut big enough then go for Lowry, that is the only change that I would make to this dream offseason but did not want to be too unrealistic.