Editor’s note: This is the Tuesday, July 27 edition of the Purple & Bold Lakers newsletter from reporter Kyle Goon. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
When the basketballs get shelved, somehow imaginations start running wild.
That’s been the recent key of NBA free agency, in which the rumor mill starts spinning furiously and fans start dreaming of every great player under the sun wearing their team’s jersey. That might be exponentially true of Lakers fans, who have gleefully heard and spread rumors of any of the following players potentially coming to L.A.: Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, Kyle Lowry, Damian Lillard, Ben Simmons, DeMar DeRozan, Bradley Beal, C.J. McCollum, Lonzo Ball (again) and any number of free agents or disgruntled players.
In this space we’ve tackled some of the limitations the Lakers face when it comes to adding a superstar via trade. Not that wild things can’t happen — it’s almost a sure bet that general manager Rob Pelinka is looking for another big swing that will push the Lakers back to the top of the heap. But in hypothetical deals and theoretical discounts that stars will take to win, a few factors aren’t being taken into account the way they should.
Before you start running wild with trade rumors, here’s a few guardrails that will help keep imaginations at least tethered to reality:
The Lakers have a long way to match big salaries in potential trades.
For more detail, you can reference our prior newsletter on the issues of dealing for a third star, but the short version is the Lakers can only take 125% of the salary that they send out in a trade. For the best players on the biggest contracts, that’s a huge issue with the current roster.
One of the hottest rumors at the moment is the Lakers are interested in Russell Westbrook, an L.A. native who, at his best, is a dynamic two-way player and helped will the Wizards into the playoffs last year. While you can quibble with the fit of a player who shot just 31.5% on 3-pointers last year (and to be clear, I absolutely would be skeptical), the biggest number that should give you pause is his contract next season: $44.2 million. The Lakers would have to send at least $35.4 million to Washington to get Westbrook back, which is the equivalent to how much money Anthony Davis is making next year.
Obviously the Lakers aren’t trading Davis. If you add up Kyle Kuzma ($13 million), Kentavious Caldwell-Pope ($13 million) and if Montrezl Harrell opts in ($9.7 million), you get $35.7 million, and then the Lakers probably would have to throw in their No. 22 first-round draft pick with that package.
But ask yourself: Do the Wizards want two bench players and a starting guard at Bradley Beal’s position for a former MVP player? It feels like a ridiculously long shot that Washington sees that as an equivalent value, especially if that move convinces Bradley Beal to finally demand a trade. Trades for All-Star level players require sweeteners, like multiple draft picks that were included in the Davis, Jrue Holiday and James Harden trades. The Lakers don’t have a lot of sweeteners, even if they can do the Herculean task of matching salary (which we’ll get to in a minute).
Sign-and-trades are totally in the hands of players.
One big way the Lakers could potentially start getting into conversations for high-contract players is by executing a sign-and-trade with Dennis Schröder, who fell a little bit short of lofty expectations last season. There have certainly been more rumors about the Lakers on the lookout for other star guards than rumors about working out an extension with Schröder, 27, who has talked both about coming back, but also looking forward to experiencing free agency for the first time in his career.
While it may seem at times like a change of scenery would be best for both sides, it’s worth noting that sign-and-trades are both rare and usually are the result of the receiving team needing a way to fit a big salary under the cap. It worked with Jimmy Butler in Miami in 2019 in part because the Heat didn’t have the outright cap space to sign him as a free agent, so Philadelphia was able to get assets in return (Josh Richardson didn’t last long there, however).
In order to execute a sign-and-trade with Schröder, the key party who needs to consent is Schröder himself. He is a free agent, so if he wants to go to a team with cap space, he’s free to do so rather than entangle himself in a contract that will set him up where the Lakers want to go.
Let’s say for example that the Lakers want to sign Schröder to an extension then send him to Toronto for Kyle Lowry (an entirely hypothetical scenario) — why would Schröder choose to go to Toronto, which would be losing a great player who plays his position, when he might also be able to walk into cap space in Dallas or New York or anyone else who might want to pay him market value. If Schröder’s sometimes confusing comments about Los Angeles have indicated anything, it’s that he wants to be the one who chooses where he goes.
The Lakers would struggle with a hard cap.
One niche but important aspect of the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement is knowing when a team triggers its hard cap. That happened this past year when the Lakers used the full midlevel exception to sign Harrell, and it would happen this next year if they received a player in a sign-and-trade, such as Kyle Lowry or Chris Paul.
The hard cap amount would be $143 million, which would be very, very tough to stay under especially with LeBron James ($41.2 million) and Davis ($35.4 million) already under contract. Assuming they keep Kuzma, Caldwell-Pope, Harrell and Marc Gasol (plus $5 million of dead money from Luol Deng’s nightmare 2016 deal that is still on the books) salaries already total $120 million, leaving them just $23 million to sign the rest of the roster and unable to exceed that $143 million number for any reason.
Realistically, the Lakers would probably have to unload salary from one or more of the non-James-and-Davis players on the roster to make a sign-and-trade with a third star, who would likely be making conservatively $15 million to $20 million, but probably more. Even minimum contracts, depending on experience, range from $1.5 million to $2.7 million, so putting together six or seven of those adds up.
Once the Lakers set a hard cap, it becomes a high-stakes game of Tetris to figure out how to add supporting talent, and the roster almost certainly would wind up having fewer players than the requisite 15. It’s not a headache that the team wants to have — paying the luxury tax is easier than figuring out how to live below the hard cap with the current payroll situation.
Several veterans have good reasons not to take pay cuts.
Last year’s addition of Andre Drummond on a minimum deal may have made a few Lakers’ fans somewhat delirious. Would Chris Paul sign for the midlevel exception at $5 million? What about DeMar DeRozan? Would any former All-Star take a minimum contract?
For the players that the Lakers are looking at, here’s a difficult rhetorical pushback: Why should they?
Paul is the prime example here, coming off a Finals run where he was widely viewed as the galvanizing factor that pushed the Phoenix Suns, who hadn’t made the playoffs for a decade, into a Finals team. Even though he’s 36 years old, he has a $44.2 million option for next season, and undoubtedly the Suns and a few other contenders would be interested in signing him for a multi-year deal maybe not at that specific number but close to it. If he already made the Finals with the Suns, what incentive would he have to take a huge discount to join the Lakers, a team he beat last season? And as the president of the NBPA, which collectively bargains for more player money and benefits all the time, it would be a bad look for Paul to accept a huge pay cut just to play with the Lakers.
Let’s just say it now: It’s not happening.
Lowry is another interesting case: He has a ring, and while he’s winding down at 35, he undoubtedly would have value on a championship team. What keeps him from walking into cap space in say, Miami? Why would he take a discount to join the Lakers, which did not think highly enough of him to trade for him at the deadline last season? Players in the NBA operate with high egos, and it should be telling that Lowry torched the Lakers with 37 points and 11 assists when the Raptors came back to L.A., giving them an up-close-and-personal display of what they missed out on when they didn’t trade for him.
It’s hard to see a world in which Lowry would take the non-trade that personally, then take less money to play for the Lakers a few months later.
Let’s end this section with some positivity, though. DeRozan, a Compton native, seems to potentially be open to coming back to Los Angeles. On a podcast with Shannon Sharpe, DeRozan said it could potentially be “a great opportunity” to play with the Lakers. But after his production last year (21.6 ppg, 6.9 apg, 4.2 rpg), it’s hard to see him taking a major pay cut from his $27.7 million salary last season. He’s only about to turn 32.
The Lakers’ trade currency has limited value.
Back to the “sweeteners” conversation: Really, what do the Lakers have to trade?
It was a little telling and perhaps a little embarrassing on Sunday when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski said on national television that “almost every team I’ve talked to in the league” had been offered some package involving Caldwell-Pope and Kuzma. That tells you that the Lakers are OK with parting with those players — who it should be mentioned just nine months ago were considered key pieces of a title team — and inherently makes them less valuable as trade chips. If the Lakers are OK shopping Kuzma and KCP all over the league, how much value do they really have?
That’s a slightly unfair judgment of both players, who given a full offseason and normal circumstances might prove their value to the Lakers once again. But it’s hard to see either getting a huge return on the trade market given that the Lakers are reportedly so eager to send them out. Add to that the potential opt-in of Harrell, who saw his production drop from his 2019-20 Sixth Man of the Year campaign and has been grousing this offseason that he was underutilized during the playoffs. Add to that the No. 22 draft pick, which might be able to find a somewhat useful role player, but is a draft slot from which stars rarely emerge.
*****
It’s always more fun to dream big than to pour water on hypothetical scenarios. Imaginary trades and signings drive the engine of excitement during the offseason. But think about it this way: It’s always better to go in with low expectations and be surprised than to float above the clouds imagining every star under the sun getting on the roster and eventually plummet back to earth.
— Kyle Goon
Editor’s note: Thanks for reading the Purple & Bold Lakers newsletter from reporter Kyle Goon. To receive the newsletter in your inbox, sign up here.
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