3. The Los Angeles Lakers might be the only team willing to give Zach LaVine the max
Zach LaVine is a really good basketball player but he is not someone who can be the best player on a title-contending team. Whether or not LaVine is worth the max is the big question of the offseason and there is a chance that the Chicago Bulls themselves don’t think that LaVine is a max guy.
When it really boils down to it, the Lakers might be the only team that is willing to give LaVine a max contract because of the team’s desperation to fix the Westbrook situation. Personally, I do not think he is worth a full max deal but if you can get Westbrook out of LA and extend the championship window then you bite the bullet and slightly overpay him to make it happen.
Not many teams in free agency might be willing to give LaVine a max deal and other contenders probably are not going to execute this kind of sign and trade. It is hard to find LaVine a more natural fit than the Lakers, especially considering any team that executes a sign and trade would be capped at the tax apron.
Other teams may not be willing to do that but the Lakers likely would. LA would have to essentially give away Talen Horton-Tucker for free (or include him in the LaVine deal) and sign all minimum players on top of the players they already have. The depth would be questionable but the Lakers would have a bonafide big three that they did not have before.
It is hard to see any other team taking that kind of risk for a player like LaVine who is a notch below that max level. A team like the 76ers might try and pull it off but the advantage the Lakers have there is that Tobias Harris has two more years left on his contract while Westbrook only has one.
At the end of the day, the Los Angeles Lakers make more sense for Zach LaVine than any other team in the league.