The Lakers have proven that they care about talent first, but if they’re going to bring in Russell Westbrook, then we should ask whether he’d actually fit better than Dennis Schröder.
Nothing knocks you out of vacationing bliss quite like Harrison Faigen screaming at you about Russell Westbrook. So that’s what I welcomed myself back to the airwaves with on this week’s episode of “The Anthony Irwin” show.
Let’s start with what little we know.
For starters, the Los Angeles Lakers have proven time and time again that they care about talent above all else. In some cases (like getting LeBron James and Anthony Davis), it’s worked out pretty perfectly. It also helps that their talents fit seamlessly but I digress.
In other cases, — we don’t need to name any names, Montrezl Harrell and Andre Drummond — it doesn’t necessarily work and I wind up sitting up late at night wondering what might have been with Damian Jones.
In the best of cases, you get a mix of talent and role players who fit and you have that vaunted lineup of Alex Caruso, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Danny Green, LeBron James and Anthony Davis that played some of the best basketball I’ve ever seen.
If the Lakers trade for Westbrook, I’m concerned that it would look a lot more like the Magic Johnson experiment than the proven approach of surrounding LeBron with shooting only with the added factor of “Hey, who’s going to tell Russ you can’t look off LeBron down the stretch of games?”.
Harrison and I discussed that, Lakers Twitter’s infatuation with DeMar DeRozan and somehow convincing themselves that he’s going to happily take a pay cut of around $20 million or so because Lakers, what to do with Dennis Schröder and more.
You can listen to all that and more on the full episode in the player embedded below, and to make sure you never miss a single show moving forward, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.
And for a short-form recap pod, check out Lakers Lowdown, in which Anthony Irwin recaps the previous day’s news and gets you ready for the day ahead in LakerLand, every weekday morning on the Silver Screen & Roll Podcast feed. You can follow Anthony on Twitter @AnthonyIrwinLA.
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