“Shoulda, coulda, woulda.” If the Hield trade would have gone down, it still wouldn’t have helped much because he’s an over rated one tool player who doesn’t play D. The Westbrook trade has been the worst I have witnessed as a Laker fan of almost 40 years. The vet minimum pickups( DJ, Baze, Ariza) were awful compared to the available crop of players out there. He got the Monk signing right and bad luck with Nunn. Effort of and injuries to both AD and LeGM of course have played a major part in our bad record but those are SEPARATE from the abysmal roster construction.
If that was the trade, I’m not mad at Rob for that. Lebron wanted Westbrook here, you don’t get to make that mess and then try to waste our only asset to get out of it, screw that.
I give him a ton of credit for being able to say NO to Klutch and Lebron. After caving in on the Westbrook trade, I think it was the absolutely right thing to do - not to lose more assets just to clean up the mess the same Lebron created. That move would be a lateral move that would not improve our current situation while damaging our future one. Lebron has traded 15(!) 1st round picks in the 3 teams he was part of. That's unbelievable. It takes a lot of balls to do what Pelinka apparently did and I'm on his side. I hope Jeannie has his back and that he's on the wheel as we transition to a different team in the next couple of years.
if it was wall/wood for russ/THT, it makes more sense to me. but for a team that has fans who want to ship out AD, i don't think they want to trade westbrook for wall. getting more talent at the big spots is important, though. we backed ourselves into a smallball corner with over-the-hill vet mins as the only options aside from AD, so any russ or THT trade needs to bring back someone who can credibly play 20-30mpg at pf/c.
Yeah I believe Windhorst and Ramona reported that the trade included Wood and THT. If that was the case then I think we should have done it. Wall for Russ and the pick alone makes no sense for us.
Rob can and should tell Klutch "look, I had a trade done with Buddy Hield and another with Demar Rozan and I went with your guy's (LBJ) wishes and brought in Westbrick and that has failed to date. Now I'm taking things into my hands and I'm not robbing Peter to pay Paul to cover Wall and his situation for you with no real foreseeable gain to us. Better we finish off the experiment with Russ and see if he can operate with these guys in the final months. We know it takes Russ time to get going and it is doubled playing with a ball-handler like Lebron. If there is no change or a bright light at the end of the tunnel by the end of this season, then we can talk about Wall, because if I am bringing in a guy who's been on the bench for a year, I want him to have a camp and pre-season to get ready"
i think rob can work in this league, but not with rambis over his shoulder. i just can't believe how much we've invested in kurt rambis because he chose a good wife. i mean, i chose a good wife, and i'm thrilled about it. but people shouldn't listen to me about everything because of it.
The wife thing can work both ways. For example, when George Lucas was married to Marcia Lucas during the original trilogy, she made sure to keep George from f***ing it up. Result? A masterpiece. When he went at it with the prequels, no Marcia, George really f***ed up Star Wars to the point where he sold it to that used dishrag Disney and then they proceeded to flush Star Wars completely into the sewer. The moral of the story is, don't marry a ***** or you will ruin your life and everyone around you.
i'm really not sure we can say that rob's a poor talent evaluator. again, the worst trades we've made were engineered primarily by magic and klutch, respectively. our draft picks have been great, and so have some of our signings, tbh. are we blaming rob for nunn's injury? are we saying that monk at the vet min wasn't maybe the very best signing of the offseason by any team? my personal opinion is that rob is fine but has had to deal with a prickly situation with klutch and an ownership group that a) doesn't fully empower him to make decisions and occasionally meddles in some (this is never good, imo), and b) isn't willing to spend at the same level of primary competitors. our problems start at the top, imo. hardest kind to deal with, unfortunately. if ballmer owned us, we'd be in much better shape, sweat stains and bluster and all. i'd rather preserve the basketball brand than the ownership brand.
that's why i used him as the example, specifically. yes, he's very visible. but you don't hear about the in-fighting in their organization, and you don't see them pinching pennies on the fringes of their roster. everyone's so impressed with ty lue's coaching job, but after their two stars they have several players making above league average to step in. i think vogel would have us playing better ball if he wasn't throwing 8 vet mins out there every night. and even if you believe ty lue is god (again, i don't), the only reason he isn't here is because a) we wouldn't pay enough/guarantee enough and b) we wanted to meddle with his job by picking his assistants. good organizations don't do this stuff. much like vogel, we can replace rob, and it won't matter. in both cases, it's likely the successor is actually worse at the job, imo.
he's a comical figure who would make our on-court product much, much better. people don't become fans of basketball teams because they have a cool owner. s***, nobody likes the hornets! not even in charlotte!
I think this is spot on and a big part of my concern with blowing everything up and starting over. Our rivals across the street and in the Bay have deep pockets and better run organizations and in the long run that matters. We’ve seen plenty of historic franchises across sports struggle due to bad ownership and decision making. The road to becoming the Knicks, Cowboys, etc etc isn’t as far as most would like to think. We hire based on familiarity and not on getting the best of the best. Even Rob is here because of his connection to Kobe. Magic was placed in the wrong role. Vogel was like our third guy. We’re the Lakers and we should really be getting the cream of the crop from top to bottom.
