2022-23 Team Developments: News / Trades / Free Agents / Rumors

We need to stop acting like Rob just became bad as a GM. Lebron picked LA independent of Rob and he is why we landed AD & won a chip. Beat up on him for the Westbrook stuff if you want, but he is the only reason we have that banner.

And at the end of the day, Rob shouldn’t be letting him make personnel decisions either. That’s his job. So drag him for the trash roster.

 

Rob gets picked on too much but the truth is yes, you do not allow your stars to tell you who to pick. It may be that they merely convinced him to go get Westbrook and that he wasn't forced to but either way, it's his fault. The other thing he did was offer Schroder a 4-year 84 million contract and we dodged that bullet luckily due to greed. Some would say he let our championship team go a little too easily too.

 

i don't think we overpaid for AD compared to pg, gobert type trades.....the problem is Rob n injuries

 

What do you think about LeBron’s extension? Do you like it, or think that it hampers our ability to fill out a roster with more than cast offs and minimum players?
I think it was only done for business reasons.

 

Lebron, like Kobe deserves their salary....these guys are not tim duncan or dirk, taking less to get better players. Theres no guarantees Rob could sign better players if Bron takes say $10M a yr less

 

I disagree that a player who rarely plays defense deserves the lion’s share of the cap, but that’s just me.
Kobe deserved his salary because of his 20 years of service along with FIVE Championships. When it comes to Laker greats, it’s disrespectful to even compare LeBron’s short stint here with the Greatest Laker ever.

 

i don't care about deserves, nor do i know what that means in this context. these guys are incredibly rich. their families will be rich in perpetuity. their salary now is a matter of principles and values. i can't dictate that for them, and they've earned the right to do so. but they don't get to complain about not being competitive when they're a big reason for why they're not competitive. kobe didn't. lebron is. and it annoys me. you took the cash. shut up and play. it was your meddling that got you here in the first place; more meddling isn't the answer. enjoy the situation you created. and i'm not being sarcastic there, actually. be happy with it because you made it.

ironically, dirk and td didn't complain that their front offices probably didn't fully exploit the benefits of their pay cuts--because they were content with themselves and their choices. lebron clearly isn't.

 

do you think AD will take a pay cut with his next extension given his injury history?

 

I agree with most of this, especially the latter part. I’d say Lebron is worth the lions share of the cap because he is in very rare air. Most would put him as the 2nd best basketball player in history, so given that he is still pretty productive, I’m not surprised.

I would say though that in general, older players just shouldn’t eat up as much salary cap as they do. Those should be rare exceptions (ie Kobe, Lebron).

 

I think it does hamper us and while I get why we did it I don’t know that extending him was the right move if we aren’t going to make any trades.

my understanding from the handful of guys I know who’ve played any professional sport is that the top guys can be willing to sacrifice salary if there is a plan in place or specific guys the team lays out that they are targeting. Otherwise, they generally want what they are worth. You also tend to see that more from guys who’ve been with a franchise for a long time.

So as a fan, I wish LeBron had taken a bit less but if he doesn’t trust the front office to use that extra cash wisely then I understand why he’d take the money.

I think that was part of Kobe’s thinking as well.

So yeah, that’s all a tricky one for me mentally as I don’t know that either side should’ve kept this thing going but I get why they did to an extent.

 

I only have sympathy for us fans having to watch this all play out and a terrible product on the floor.

Pretty much everyone else involved is rich and will be fine regardless of the outcome of this mess.

 

This is the problem I have: these decisions are business ones, not basketball ones.

 

i don't get why we haven't moved more quickly from bev/nunn. the knicks aren't playing fournier or reddish. we gave minutes to matt ryan earlier in the year because we were so desperate for shooting, and we're playing pat bev at sf. having 30 million in cap space (which would require renouncing almost the entire team again, btw) isn't worth waiting longer. do that deal or something like it.

i totally get why we haven't moved russ. i still think some things could happen there, but there's no need to rush, and his salary is just so large that any deal probably involves some level of risk in terms of who's coming back. you don't want another albatross contract going forward.

 

Jazz are out of their mind. Collins is the best player in that deal and DA wants picks coming his way?

At least we're not the only team he tried to f*** over this year.

 

For me, it’s not just about “what have you done for me lately.”
It’s the “too many cooks” issue in the FO.
It’s the overall lack of experience and credibility of the people she puts her trust in.
It’s the doubling down on Rob when most of the decisions he’s made have blown up in his face as made the team worse.
It’s the handing over of so much power to Klutch.
It’s the laying down and doing absolutely nothing to improve this very flawed team.
Everything we have learned over the past few years of just how poorly this FO is run has resulted in some of the worst basketball we’ve had to witness over the past 30 seasons.
It’s her job to put the best possible candidates in place within the FO- not just her friends. This is the opposite of how her Father built this Franchise and it’s still amazing to me that Jeanie has yet to realize this.
Again, the state of our FO, or the “great” players we had signed had absolutely nothing to do with LeBron’s decision to come.
Furthermore, I think we can all agree that Magic was one of the worst Executives in Laker history when it came to team building and yet HE IS STILL one of the cooks in our disfunctional FO.

 

As long as Jeanie is in charge, Rob will still be here. She just gave him an extension months after he completed one of the worst trades in Laker history.
Out of touch with reality.

 

I actually don’t think Russ will be moved at all. They would rather let him walk than get back players that could be traded later if they don’t work out. They also put more importance on Star Chasing than building a proper team.
I would be very interested in who they are targeting this summer with their ever so precious cape space.
The list of Free Agents available is underwhelming.
Then again, they think players like Westbrick can help a team win a Chip.