Lakers are foolish to wait until the deadline to make a trade

The Los Angeles Lakers currently do not have a roster that can contend for an NBA Championship next season. A very similar roster failed to even make the play-in last season as the big three of LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook simply do not work well together.

There was some positive news coming from the Lakers when the team signed LeBron to a two-year contract extension on Wednesday. It was long speculated that LeBron would use his expiring contract to leverage the Lakers into making a move and him signing the deal this early seemingly signaled that the Lakers were about to make a move.

ESPN’s Dave McMenamin said on NBA Today that the Lakers were waiting until LeBron signed his extension to commit to trading both their 2027 and 2029 first-round pick. But despite that, LeBron signed the extension reportedly knowing that the Lakers may wait until the deadline to make a move.

LeBron thinks that once he gets to the playoffs he has a chance, which seemingly indicates why he would be okay waiting for a trade. While we cannot blame LeBron for having confidence, this confidence could really hurt the team.

The Los Angeles Lakers do not have the luxury of waiting until the NBA Trade deadline.

There are some positives in waiting until the deadline to trade Russell Westbrook. At that point, Westbrook will only be half a season of an expiring contract and will be much cheaper to buy out. The trade market will also be more developed and certain players may not be as valuable as other teams thought they were.

There are two potential possibilities here. The Brooklyn Nets may finally move off of Kyrie Irving if it is simply not working since he would be on an expiring as well. Or, the Indiana Pacers may realize that their market for Buddy Hield and Myles Turner is not as good as expected and is willing to accept just one pick in a Westbrook deal.

Those hypotheticals are great, but they still are just hypotheticals. There is also the chance that the Nets gel nicely and Brooklyn wants to hold on to Kyrie. Or perhaps another contender could suffer an injury or be worse than expected and offers more for Hield and/or Turner.

Meanwhile, the Lakers will be running the same core of guys out there with a schedule that is not very favorable in the first half of the year. By the time the trade deadline rolled around last season the Lakers were already 26-30. That easily could be the case in 2022-23 as well.

The Western Conference is loaded and the Lakers have to be a top-six team in order to avoid the play-in. There is no guarantee that Los Angeles would be able to claw its way back into the top six if a trade happens in early February. Last year the sixth seed was 48-34. If the Lakers are once against 26-30, can we really trust them to finish 22-4 to finish with a similar record?

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The Los Angeles Lakers are playing with fire by potentially waiting to trade Russell Westbrook.