Should the Los Angeles Lakers regret the Anthony Davis trade?

The Los Angeles Lakers have won just two playoff games over the last two seasons with LeBron James and missed the play-in entirely this past season. With high preseason expectations, the 2021-22 Lakers will go down as one of the most disappointing teams of all time.

The purple and gold are in a tough spot as well as the roster is depleted and there is no easy path to replenishing it this offseason. While the Lakers sit at home, Laker fans watch the likes of Brandon Ingram, Alex Caruso, Larry Nance Jr, D’Angelo Russell and Jordan Clarkson get playoff minutes. Lonzo Ball would be out there as well if he was not injured.

With no youth on the roster and no draft picks for another five years, one may raise the question: should the Los Angeles Lakers regret trading for Anthony Davis? The Lakers traded a historic haul for Davis back in the summer of 2019 when they probably could have just waited a year and signed him in 2020.

While it is frustrating to see guys like Brandon Ingram ball out (and even more frustrating that the Lakers do not have their pick this year, which could be in the top four), it is more complex than that. In reality, there is only one answer to the proposed question.

No, the Los Angeles Lakers should not regret the Anthony Davis trade.

The Lakers won a championship! Just because there was a global pandemic that shut the season down and forced the team to win the title in Orlando does not mean it should count any less. Yes, it sucks that the team did not get to properly celebrate with its fans but at the end of the day, a ring is a ring.

That ring came in the 2020 season, only hammering home the point that the trade for AD was worth it. If the Lakers simply waited until the 2020 offseason to sign Anthony Davis then they would not have won a championship.

There are two main counter-points to the fans who don’t think trading AD was worth any of the young players. First, is the money that the team would have had to pay those guys. Brandon Ingram got a hefty payday and if the Lakers would have kept him then they either would not have been able to sign AD or they would have had to seriously sacrifice depth, letting Lonzo Ball, Kyle Kuzma, Josh Hart and all those young guys walk anyway.

And I love Ingram as much as the next person, but the Lakers are not title contenders with him being the second-best player on the team. What has he accomplished in New Orleans? A lot of guys can put up decent numbers on bad teams. This is his first time making the playoffs with the team and it had to take the play-in and a positive COVID-19 test for Paul George.

The second counter-point to anyone who is against the AD trade is the fact that the AD trade is not what put this team in the situation it is in. If the Lakers would have just ran it back with last year’s roster and a few small additions (like Malik Monk) then they would have been a near-lock to make the Western Conference Finals.

Instead, they traded almost all of their depth for Russell Westbrook, a superstar who did not fit at all. That is the reason why the Lakers are “cooked” for the next few years, not because they traded guys who probably would have signed with other teams by now for AD three years ago.

Let’s not forget that last year’s Lakers were up 2-1 against last year’s Western Conference Champions (and arguably the best team in the league this year) before Anthony Davis got hurt. If AD does not get hurt he might have two rings to his name on the Lakers and this would not even be a conversation.

But because the Los Angeles Lakers made the mistake of trading for Russell Westbrook, it somehow is.