A 3-team trade package to get James Harden on the Los Angeles Lakers
By Jason Reed
Why the Los Angeles Lakers could say yes to this James Harden trade:
I just want to be on the record and say that I personally would never agree to this trade if I was running the Los Angeles Lakers. James Harden is already regressing and it is only going to get worse as he gets older. The team would be turning one year of a bad contract into multiple years of a bad contract down the line and it could get very ugly.
That being said, the Lakers are desperate for winning a championship and if they can flip their biggest problem in Russell Westbrook for another star in James Harden then they probably would do it. Los Angeles convinced themselves of Russell Westbrook just with a little bit of pressure from LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Do you really think they wouldn’t convince themselves of Harden as well?
That is the sole logic of this trade for the Lakers. They are hoping that they make an improvement from Russell Westbrook and can win a championship next season and they can live with the results later. That seems to be how the team has operated over the last few years, anyways.
This would put the team in a bad situation in the future but they would be sacrificing that for perceived current success, convincing themselves that the elite Harden is still in there and he just needs to be in the right situation.