Official 2016 Free Agency Thread

Luke's my guy. If he loves it, I love it.

 

No, I said a contender would only be able to offer him 20 mil, if he wanted 30 mil he'd have to go to a mediocre or bad team. Even the Heat have to get creative to give him 20 mil and stay competitive. Again, I'd take him for 2 years, but I don't think we're on his radar at all.

 

Why exactly is anyone wasting their time worrying about social media & "shockjock" narratives?

It wasn't that long ago, all we heard was "Kobe can't win without Shaq!" & "20-year old LeBron is already better than Kobe in his prime!" blah blah blah. That was all nonsense, just like this "they're not the 'Lakers' anymore". BS! No team is immune to down cycles. We've got more wins than any other team & the 2nd most titles, and even we aren't going to contend to win a title every single year. Going through these down years just makes the title years all the more sweet. Personally, I enjoyed the '09 & '10 titles exponentially more because I spent so much time commiserating with all you guys on CL about the Lakers struggles, and worrying if we were wasting Kobe's prime & all that.

And ya know what else? All the success we've been spoiled with historically, and over the past 20 years specifically, means we're going to have a ton more fans that hate us. All those fools are LOVING this inevitable downturn. F 'em! I couldn't care less. We're starting to turn a corner, and they're getting their shots in now while they still can because we're not attractive to the Durant's of the world right now. Give any one of these fools truth serum, and if they know basketball, they'd admit that we've laid the foundation of some elite young prospects. Will they for sure pan out? I don't know. Nothing is for sure, but we're in as good of position to build something special as any team that's struggled like we have these past few years. It's a process, and we're going through the tough times that were necessary to produce some great young talent to rebuild with.

Give these kids a year or two to develop, and we won't be hearing jack about how horrible the Lakers are from folks out there that love seeing us struggle.

 

You just made my same points/agreed with me. He liked our pitch (Hollywood) and GM (West). And I'm sorry, it's not opinion, you are wrong if you think Shaq comes to LA if we are were a 17 win team and we hadn't made the playoffs already a couple times and shown actual promise. Not just flashes of potential, actual potential turning into results. We were a 48-34 team the year before he joined. He had also heard about and seen Kobe and liked what he saw.

 

Holy...

 

Snitchangelo isn't a factor in us not getting anyone. Our team sucks and our front office sucks. Why would a free agent want to come to a team that was the 2nd worst team in the NBA? We have even more question marks than when Kobe was still actually on the team and recruiting for us. Players were giving us meetings out of respect to one of the greatest players of all time that they grew up watching. Now that that's gone, we have nothing appealing other than our money which 25 other teams in the NBA have tons of as well.