It appeared that the Los Angeles Lakers would be willing to do anything to move off of Russell Westbrook this offseason after the disaster that was last season. However, the Lakers may not be as desperate as we thought they were to move on from the former MVP.
Per Jovan Buha of The Athletic, the Lakers have no intentions to trade a first-round pick along with Westbrook to move him this offseason. While this might seem smart to some, the fact of the matter is that the Lakers are not trading Westbrook during the offseason without there being a first-round pick involved.
Westbrook has absolutely no trade value. The only value he has is as an expiring contract and teams are not simply going to do the Lakers a favor. The Lakers will have to include value in the trade with Westbrook and a first-round pick is the only way to do that. Sorry, but Talen Horton-Tucker’s inflated contract isn’t enough.
I cannot totally blame the Lakers for not wanting to sell more of the future to fix a problem for the 2022-23 season but if that is the mindset that the team has then they should explore another deal.
With this logic, the Los Angeles Lakers should just trade LeBron James.
Trading the face of the NBA is the hardest thing a team can possibly do but if the Lakers truly have zero intentions of including any sort of future first-round pick to move Westbrook then they should stay consistent with their logic and trade LeBron.
The Lakers are not doing anything if they keep Westbrook next season. There is nothing that should be telling the team that it will suddenly improve next season with the exact same core three players all a year older. Westbrook is still a horrendous fit, LeBron is only getting older and Anthony Davis is still injury prone.
The depth around those three is still going to be bad because of monetary restrictions and while we can be as hopeful as we want, the new head coach isn’t going to magically fix all the problems that were not even Frank Vogel’s fault last year.
LeBron has one more year left under contract and while he has signaled that he wants to stay in LA, if there is one thing we know about LeBron it is that he cannot be trusted with what he says in the media. He left the Cavaliers twice, after all.
The Lakers could accelerate the reboot and get legitimate assets in a LeBron James trade. There is even a world in which the Lakers could get another star in return to build around Anthony Davis still as well as getting draft capital.
Phil Jackson reportedly wants the team to trade LeBron and build around Russell Westbrook and while this is not necessarily “building around” Westbrook, if the team is intent on keeping him because of the future sacrifice then it might as well lean into preparing for the future.
But they won’t and if Westbrook is still in town then the Lakers’ ceiling is a playoff berth with an exit in the first two rounds of the playoffs. After all, Westbrook has never made it past the second round since he stopped getting help from Kevin Durant.