The Los Angeles Lakers are off to a slow start this season and there is a good chance that they are going to need to add reinforcements at some point if they are going to make any sort of noise in the playoffs, let alone make it to the playoffs.
While Los Angeles does not have a lot of assets to trade, the team does have some flexibility in what it can do. There is a list of Lakers that could be traded that does not even include Russell Westbrook.
We also know that Rob Pelinka loves to bring back players who formerly played for the Lakers. There is a long list of payers that reunited with the team recently, including Dennis Schroder this season.
Here are 3 former Lakers that Rob Pelinka could potentially trade for during the season:
1. Jordan Clarkson
Jordan Clarkson is the runaway favorite to rejoin the Lakers this season. The Utah Jazz are playing far better than anyone expected them to (including Danny Ainge himself) and at some point, the front office is going to try and correct this path.
Utah has no interest in being a play-in team and potentially losing in the first round of the playoffs. Instead, their main focus is obviously on Victor Wembanyama. If it wasn’t then they would not have blown up the entire team this summer.
Clarkson is an obvious candidate to be traded by the Jazz and while the Lakers are guard-heavy, he would be a nice fit in Los Angeles. He would give the team a spark-plug scorer that could make shots from beyond the arc at a high volume.
The one hurdle for acquiring Clarkson is his salary and Patrick Beverley. Beverley’s contract matches up almost perfectly with Clarkson’s but LA cannot trade Beverley to the Jazz since that is the team they acquired him from.
The only way to realistically get Clarkson this season would be in a potential Westbrook trade, which obviously is not off the table.