Why the Lakers not making a trade at the deadline is a great thing

3. No trade was going to fix the Los Angeles Lakers

Sometimes a team has to look itself in the mirror and be realistic about the current situation. While it is fun to be optimistic and hopeful that a trade would spark change, it really would not have. Making a trade at the deadline would not have changed anything about the ceiling of this Lakers team. If the ceiling is going to change then they have to fix it themselves.

There was only one thing that could have changed the ceiling of the Lakers and that would have been to trade Russell Westbrook in a salary dump trade. However, that would have taken at least one, if not two first-round picks to pull off. That is something the team had no interest in doing.

Trading THT for a marginally better role player was not going to suddenly fix the Lakers. Even if the team pulled off the best-case scenario trade for someone like Buddy Hield, it was not going to raise the team’s ceiling.

So why punt on someone you have bet on (THT) for a role player that is going to have a marginal impact in the grand scheme of things? It is one thing to trade THT for a role player if the Lakers were a team that was one piece away. They aren’t. They are a team that has one (large) piece that simply does not fit the puzzle.

Sure, it is boring and it would have been awesome to see the team pull off a big trade. It simply was not going to happen and never was going to happen.

Thankfully, Rob Pelinka and co. did the right thing by being patient. The situation of the team still sucks, but at least they did not make it worse.