Ah. That makes it harder. They still should have some decent players looking to saddle up, but that's a challenge for them.
72 Suburbs in Search of a City: Anthony Davis to Los Angeles Lakers
- Thread starter RedOctober3829
- Start date
First, they have to find a max player that wants to play there. If Kawhi, KD, and Klay are presumed unavailable, there are really only three possibilities. The first is Kemba, who all accounts indicate wants to stay in Charlotte. Still, he’s probably the most likely option. The second option is Kyrie. While most link Kyrie to Brooklyn, there remains the possibility he can be swayed to join LA. The third is Jimmy Butler. He might actually be the most logical target but there’s no evidence LA is recruiting him so Philly probably closes the deal before LA even realizes maybe they should be recruiting the best player out of these three.
After that, you have a group of bigs, none of which are good fits (Horford, Harris, Vucevic) because Lebron and Davis should be playing the 4 and 5 respectively in the modern NBA. You also have Khris Middleton, who would fit great in LA but who it’s not clear is even considering leaving the Bucks.
4 years ago, Lebron still had the pull that I think we’d safely assume he’d definitely pull in one of the premier FA. That’s not the case anymore. Paul George spurned him a year ago and Kawhi seems completely disinterested in playing with him. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the Lakers end up in the pile of teams fighting to find ways to spend their cap space on the leftover FA undeserving of max contracts.
Second, Kuzma isn’t a solid 4th scoring option. Kuzma is a good 2nd or 3rd scoring option on a bad team because he can shoot for volume at passable efficiency. But him on a team with real offensive weapons and his main skill becomes redundant or even a negative. He’s basically Marcus Morris without the streaky 3 point shooting or the illusion of defensive ability. Now, it’s possible Kuzma develops his shooting to the point where he can be a typical Lebron teammate and be an asset perched in a corner. He’s also helpful if they fail to sign a third star because they’ll need someone to carry the load as Lebron and AD coast through the regular season, and he can do that, just not terribly well. But Kuzma is a guy who should be at most the 8th man on a contender, not the 4th.
Yeah, it's pretty clear at this point that Pelinka has no f***ing clue what he's doing. He didn't dot a single i in the trade wrt the July 30th date, and now it seems like he's realizing for the first time how hard it's going to be to put a team together under the cap.
What blows my mind even more is that LeBron/Klutch don't seem to have realized this. This is VERY different from the "we don't care about future assets because LeBron will be retired thing." This is not realizing they've fucked their team and won't be able to put together a reasonable NBA roster this year.
If NO is going to work with LA to give LA the extra time, space, and cap room to sign another max guy, they'd damned well better be bleeding LA completely dry and then some.
Griffin’s actions to this point give me no reason to doubt that he’ll do just that.
Good because there's no way LA should be getting a get out of jail free card here when they screwed up big-time. They made this deal at this time - probably pushing NO the whole while - because they believed they could get another max guy. When it turned out that, oops, you can't until X date, they began this mad scramble to redo the deal. No f-ing way that NO should just agree to an extension or expansion unless they're just sucking every last morsel out of the Lakers. I'd demand #1 picks for a few more years. I'd demand that the Lakers organization pay for NO's soda machine ($1 to Moneyball). Anything. Everything. LA is totally committed at this point.
The funny thing is, Griffin raided the Lakers’ cupboard so hard, there’s barely anything left that he CAN ask for under league rules. I suppose he could un-protect the 2021 pick and turn the 2022 one into a pick swap, but he might not even WANT that, since he probably wants NO to have 2 picks in the double draft.
Pelinka, with his hand forced by James, is getting borderline irresponsible at this point, and starting to run up against league rules designed to make it impossible for a franchise to fuck its future too hard in exactly these types of circumstances.
Time for Linda to crack some skulls here!
This really does look like a Laker face plant, as far as the front office details are concerned. I'm still not convinced, after watching Rob's draft (Wagner surprise), trades (Muscala?) and 1yr FA signings (Beasley, Lance, etc) last season that he has any clue or is listening to his analytics dept.
I would like to hear the Laker apologists in this thread explain how Pelinka is going to build this roster. Maybe a deft GM finds the magic combo of overlooked D-Leaguers and vet-minimum ring-chasers to fill out a plausible rotation, but Pelinka?
Lines for “who will win the title” are not efficient. If there’s a lot of stupid money on one team to win the title, the books will move the line to protect their downside, and there’s no mechanism for smart money to take the field and push the odds back to where they should be.
Regular-season over/under lines, however, are efficient, and I think we can assume they are highly correlated with gamblers’ perceptions of each team’s title chances. Here’s what those O/Us look like now (source):
Bucks 55.5
Lakers 54.5
Rockets 53.5
Sixers, Raptors, Jazz 52.5
Nuggets 50.5
Those lines just opened, so maybe bettors will bid down the Lakers’ O/U. Personally, I kind of doubt it. These lines will move as the offseason unfolds, of course — there are all sorts of assumptions about what happens with Kawhi, Kyrie, et al., baked into these numbers. Right now, however, the conventional wisdom is that we’re looking at the most wide-open title chase in years, with the Lakers being one of a handful of teams with a decent chance to raise the trophy. That doesn’t strike me as obviously wrong.
Edit: Perhaps the Bucks are a clear-cut favorite if they re-sign all their key players; it’s unclear how much the uncertainty surrounding their free agents is weighing down their O/U.
Man, I would/will hammer the shit out of the Lakers’ under, regardless of their title chances.
Pretty sure you can only go 7 years out or so, to prevent exactly this from happening. It’s bad for the league if one desperate GM/star can destroy a franchise for decades.
Well maybe (to your last point, not to the point about league rules, of which I'm ignorant). But if one teams is in total GFIN mode and wins two titles before being rendered useless for several years, isn't it their call to make? Their "demise" just opens the door for someone else to win.
Except that the NBA as a whole has a compelling interest to avoid just that situation. Granted, the Lakers have some built-in market advantages that other teams don't have. But it doesn't help the NBA if, for example, the Grizzlies were to empty their draft cupboard for the next 15 years and be stuck around 10 wins per season without any hope of improvement. In any franchise, the franchisees give up some independence for the benefits that go along with being a member of the larger franchise.
Probably the biggest uncertainty is the Raptors w/re to Kawhi. If he re-signs then they will be rightfully favored.
Would the NBA be complaining about this possibility during the time when LeBron and AD are winning titles and bringing championships back to Los Angeles, one of their premier markets/franchises?
Some problems with this line of thinking:
1.) The Lakers are one franchise out of 30.
2.) Having AD and LeBron does not guarantee championships. In sports, nothing is guaranteed when it comes to winning titles.
3.) The league cannot make different rules for the Lakers than for other teams.
4.) The last thing the NBA wants to do is to contract a franchise the next time the economy goes south. Which almost happened to New Orleans not all that long ago.
So, yes, there is justification for the league to prevent teams from completely destroying their future for time to come. The current limits on trading draft picks seem like a reasonable compromise to mitigate against that possibility.
I get that. My question was simply this. If the NBA doesn't want situations where teams sacrifice 8 years of the future for a championship or two, that's fine. But if the Lakers were actually WINNING NBA titles with LeBron and AD (and, say, Kemba), during the time they were winning, would the NBA be complaining about the future years of dearth?
And btw, just as there's no guarantee that any team would win, there's no guarantee that even with a crazy trade like this, that a team would be terrible for 8 following years. You never know who's going to stumble on the next Giannis or Kawhi, or what free agents would come to that team.
I wasn't saying they ARE going to win. I was saying IF they win, would the NBA execs be complaining about a Herschel Walker type deal, worrying about future years, when their greatest star (LeBron) is hoisting the O'Brien trophy?
Agree that Lakers under 55 is the best bet on that page. Bucks over 55 is a close second if you’re pretty sure Middleton is coming back.
Probably too late to get in on the under — my source went online before the news about Horford (probably) leaving broke. I would’ve said 48.5 was about right a couple days ago, when it looked like Al would return and there was a decent chance that Danny would pull off some kind of three-way S/T that would net us Conley.
Yes, if the NBA could accurately foretell the future, they would not need these rules. I wish them godspeed in their fortune-telling research efforts.
Can't they turn the '24 pick swap and right to defer to '25 into a straight '24 pick swap plus the '25 pick?
Well the first step has to be to actually acquire Davis, no? What would your alternative have been in building a championship-level team that doesn't begin with Davis-LeBron? The talk above about Pelinka not understanding the CBA is ridiculous. He got the deal done and knowingly had to restructure the deal to meet the requirements of Griffin. There was NO CHANCE that Griffin was going to torpedo the #4 pick to simply comply with Pelinka's request without additonal compensation. Otherwise the player would not be able to participate in practices, the Las Vegas summer league for the Pelicans, or be moved to where the player could participate in practices/SL for the team acquiring the pick.
Add Utah to that list of WC teams improving, which means the EC is getting worse.
You telling me they didn't accurately "see" the Knicks getting the #1 pick in 1985?
The jury is still out until the FA period gets rolling but it appears that the gap is widening throughout the league with Boston, New Orleans, Charlotte, and the Lakers leaving the dreaded no-mans land with 3 seemingly going into full rebuild mode with the other ascending to the top tier. The middle class is getting thinner by the day.
i think honestly the Celtics just moved into no-man's land from being an underachieving contender to a team that has way too much talent to effectively tank but isn't going far in the playoffs.
Yeah, I agree with this. Ainge is going to have to work some magic...or Tatum/Briown are going to have to take significant leaps. And I think that people here generally overestimate Brown’s potential.
Staying on-brand with your tagline, I seeYou telling me they didn't accurately "see" the Knicks getting the #1 pick in 1985?
The only thing I feel really confident about right now is that Danny does not plan on going into the season with Brown-Tatum-Hayward-Smart and some rookies. He's going to make a move, one way or the other.
Ya just ribbing you, I had been about to make the same joke actually. But yeah, the serious point is that “championship” is such an uncertain outcome that the league isn’t ok leaving a franchise as a smoking crater for 10 years.Just keeping the conversation light.
Team LeBron?
It was announced yesterday that AD will be starring in the new SpaceJam2 movie. Some are speculating that this was designed to compensate AD for the $4m lost for him to waive his trade kicker. This would be so sneakily brilliant if true. Could you imagine someone challenging this?
It would be pretty transparent. He doesn’t even have an obscenely rich supermodel wife to provide plausible deniability to his motives for taking a team-friendly under-market deal. Amateur.
People get creative when trying to beat price controls. This is no different than min wage/rent control shenanigans.
Is there a chance of the trade falling through, if Davis doesn't waive his trade kicker and the Lakers can't dump more salary?
Why would a film studio pay the $4 million difference? Space Jam 2 has accountants and a budget - it’s not like they can easily write off a $4 million cameo.
Ramona Shelburne is about as plugged into the Lakers as you can be. I’m curious why you keep hanging on to this idea that Pelinka knows what he’s doing when we have reporting that says he didn’t know about the cap ramifications with the timing of the trade and he didn’t ask for AD to wave his trade kicker. These are not signs of competence, yet you keep insisting that there’s a plan here.
Pelinka didn't move the franchise to Peoria. Therefore, he deserves credit as a genius.
That announcement has been in the works for more than a year. It's the carrot LeBron was using to get Davis to sign on the dotted line. Why do you think I've been making so many jokes about it? Why else do you think he wanted to play for the Lakers? They're literally one of the worst run organizations on the planet, but if Davis wanted that movie role, he had to sign on with Team LeBron.
There's no way the Lakers can let this deal fall through at this point without being absolutely destroyed. Their fans are ecstatic and already making space for another banner.
The article says the Pelicans are rightfully not giving in to the Lakers' change request as it would hinder their ability to build a team in the upcoming month. But they have two more reasons: (1) they own Lakers' draft picks and do not want the team to succeed, and (2) tampering-related schadenfreude. I love this story.
This is all starting to feel like one of those things that bites a rival in the butt --- but which will have little to no effect whatsoever. The Lakers will add a max player and circumvent the cap, without punishment from the league, because the league needs the Lakers to be relevant in the post-Warriors era.
Opponents and fans of other teams will grumble, and the NBA will laugh all the way to the bank.
Not worth losing sleep over
Opponents and fans of other teams will grumble, and the NBA will laugh all the way to the bank.
Not worth losing sleep over