The San Antonio Spurs dropped the first big domino of the offseason on Wednesday as the team traded all-star guard Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks for Danilo Gallinari and three first-round picks. San Antonio is officially embracing the tank and the Los Angeles Lakers could capitalize on any potential fire sale that the team has.
Every GM in the league should be calling the Spurs to see what players are available via trade. Quite frankly, everyone on the roster outside of the players that they recently drafted is likely available.
Thus, there are several different paths the Lakers could take if they want to do business with the Spurs. San Antonio doesn’t like helping the Lakers, but if they are committed to tanking, they shouldn’t really care anyway.
Here are 3 trades the Los Angeles Lakers can make with the San Antonio Spurs after the Dejounte Murray trade:
1. The big one
The Spurs are now a candidate to take on Russell Westbrook in a salary-dump trade. If San Antonio is truly committed to tanking then it makes sense to take on a big contract like Westbrook and take a valuable first-round pick for their service.
For the Lakers, this trade essentially undoes the original Westbrook deal as they get three players who are similar to the players they traded for Westbrook. Danilo Gallinari is a better version of Kyle Kuzma, Josh Richardson can be the team’s spot-up perimeter defender like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was and Jakob Poeltl gives the team a better big than Montrezl Harrell.
Sure, the first-round pick is a heavy cost but the Lakers would be getting deeper as a team, and more importantly, would not be taking on a multi-year contract in return. That makes this return far better than Gordon Hayward or Julius Randle.
This shows LeBron James that the team wants to win this year and gives the front office financial flexibility next offseason to bring in more talent to try and keep LeBron in town.