With the Los Angeles Lakers struggling since winning the NBA In-Season Tournament, the expectation is that the team will add reinforcements alongside LeBron James and Anthony Davis at the trade deadline.
As we learn every year at the trade deadline, anything can happen in the NBA. For a year fans were told that Russell Westbrook was untradeable and then the Lakers were able to not only trade him, but pull off a trade that led the team to the Western Conference Finals.
This deadline could be even more shocking for the Lakers as the idea of trading LeBron James has emerged from being impossible to at least being feasible. With LeBron sitting out on Thursday against the Boston Celtics, the rumors started to emerge that the Lakers may be looking to trade the NBA's all-time leading scorer.
Hearing from @nba peeps @KingJames is the top of the @Lakers list to trade the 39 year old. Pelinka is looking for the right team to dance with and is close to a suitor Lbj and AD both out tonight. @KTLA @KTLA5SPORTS #nba #Lakers
— David pingalore (@DavidPingalore) February 1, 2024
David Pingalore is a sports anchor for KTLA 5 News and is not known for breaking NBA news, especially NBA news of this magnitude. Normally, posts like this would mean absolutely nothing and they would not warrant an article on Lake Show Life. However, this one is a bit diffrent.
LeBron James Lakers trade rumors actually come from an accurate source
Pingalore might not be Adrian Wojnarowski or Shams Charania but he has been right quite a few times with some of the biggest news that has happened in the NBA in recent years.
For whatever reason, Pingalore has been right about LeBron (and Los Angeles) related scoops in the past. In 2012 he posted that LeBron put out feelers about returning to the Cavaliers in two years, which he did. In February of 2018, he tweeted that LeBron was going to sign with the Lakers that summer. In 2019 he reported that Kawhi Leonard was going to the Clippers, which did not even seem like a possibility before the Paul George trade.
Say whatever you want, but Pingalore has not missed in the past and he is a visible member of the sports media landscape. This is not some upstart account "reporting" that something will happen where they are just trying to predict it that way they can pretend they are insiders. This is a legitimate person in sports media who has been right before.
All that being said, Lakers fans should take this with a grain of salt until something actually happens. Information flies all over the place leading up to the trade deadline. That is not to say that Pingalore didn't get this intel, but there is so much going on and nobody will truly be in the know if LeBron actually is being traded.
But at the end of the day, one thing is for certain: for the first time in his Lakers career, it actually seems like a feasible possibility that LeBron James could be traded. That never even entered the realm of possibility before.