3. The Los Angeles Lakers might sacrifice a lot of cap space in 2023
The one silver lining of the Russell Westbrook situation is the fact that he is on an expiring contract. At the very least, the Lakers are going to have ample cap space next summer to make necessary moves to turn the team back into a contender.
It is really hard for a team to essentially punt on a season and just run it back with a team that struggled so mightily last season but in the grand scheme of things, that could be the better route for the Lakers to take.
The Lakers already made the awful Westbrook trade and at this point it might be better to simply lay in the bed that they made instead of scrambling to fix something only to make it worse. We have seen countless NBA teams compound bad decisions with bad decisions instead of taking their medicine and moving on.
For my golf folks out there, the Lakers should just punch it through the trees and take their double bogey with the extremely small chance of them holing out for par instead of trying to go over the trees and instead recording a +4.
If the Lakers trade Westbrook then they are going to have to trade for someone with multiple years on their contract, that is the entire point of a salary-dump trade. That would lock in the team’s future for the next however many years and just like the current situation, would give them no flexibility to pivot.
If the team does not trade Westbrook they would have the power of ample cap space to bring in depth and try and lure another star to LA. Heck, LeBron could even take a pay cut for the first time in his career if it could land someone like Bradley Beal in LA. None of that is possible if they trade for Julius Randle’s contract.