2025-26 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

Ok but if I tell you let's max out Markkanen to win a title you do it? My point is if it comes to that you may be better off moving that player and let the other team pay vs being good but not great.

 

You keep AR and still win if they can find a defensive minded player who is a notch below AR offensively to come off the bench when he’s being hunted

 

Show me the time when Austin and Luka were healthy in which it didn’t work. We even got LeBron to play third fiddle and we were rolling.
If we add the necessary pieces around these three, we have a legit chance at winning a Chip.

 

Yes but at what price. This is the problem when you have a ceiling you can pay. It's not like baseball.

 

You do understand that Austin needs to sign a NEW contract with us, right?
He can just take any offer from another team if we come to him and say “we want to sign and trade you.”
More importantly, Markannen’s fate is controlled by Danny Ainge.
Were you around during the Lakers/C Bags rivalry of the 1980s?

 

This is where I think Lakers went wrong with Austin. If value got blown up without the intent on cashing in. His role was to be a role player but it had this constant talk of star. Austin is 28 in his prime. Was never a star. So why get paid like one to complicate building when in fact might be asked to play a bench role which I 100 percent believe that's below him at this point.

 

Yes Lakers created that issue. I actually talked about this last summer when JJ challenged Austin and put him on the same level as Luka. I think that was a mistake.!

 

The team has the means to accomplish it this off season.If they do or not is yet to be seen.Believe me I understand I’ve had my run ins with the AR cult

 

If I say let's team Luka and Trae Young there will be a number of people dissing Young and why he won't fit with Luka. here is the deal. like Luka young actually lead a team. Austin never did. Would Young fit like Kyrie?

 

First 32 games of this season:
26.6 PPG
6.3 assists
5.2 rebounds
1 steal
50.7% fg
Those are All Star numbers

 

you are complaining about Defense and want to exchange AR for Young?
I guess you have never watched Trae play defense then.

 

Yes professional basketball players are talented.'players can play great in stretches. When players do that in a contract year take caution. Consistency when defense is geared at you. You playing at an elite level without being fatigued.

 

See that's my point. Don't teams target Austin? So if you don't think it can work why you think it works with Austin?

 

Who is the better pg Young or Austin? Which one lead a team to conference finals?

 

I agree with this. The advanced stats are useful but sometimes you need to put away the spreadsheet and think about these things in actual basketball terms. Jokic grades out as a solidly above average defender by the metrics, but we all know that's b*******. When you get to the playoffs his lack of mobility on the perimeter, vertical rim protection and feel for defending P&R leaves them with one way to defend P&Rs - bringing him to the level of the screen. They basically need Aaron Gordon flying around like Brian Dawkins on the back end to make up for it. When he can't do that, they lose early. There's also never been a bigger difference between playoff basketball and regular season basketball. That doesn't mean the regular season is useless and there's nothing useful we can learn from it, but it does mean that you need to take regular season lineup data, net ratings, individual advanced stats, etc. with a grain of salt and try to sort through what will hold up in a playoff setting.

I think defensive concerns with Austin are very real so long as we're lacking in collective perimeter athleticism/defense and a legit rim protector. And Luka is part of that equation too. Because we don't have those things, we're forced to play this extremely switch heavy style just to prevent immediate penetration on any ballscreen. We have to trap or zone up whenever a decent ballhandler gets a matchup with one of our many not so great perimeter guys. So long as we're forced to play that style of defense for overall personnel reasons, Austin remains a pretty juicy switch target because he doesn't have the strength to switch onto bigger wings/forwards and isn't exactly great at defending scoring guards either. You can trap and rotate and scramble and do all kinds of stuff which JJ is pretty good at, but ultimately good teams are able to figure that stuff out and like we saw in the OKC series even if you can bottle someone like Shai up pretty well you end up giving up a ton of open threes to role players.

If we can get a legitimate rim protector and some better perimeter defenders out there, such that we can play more traditional coverages, then I think defensive concerns with Austin are significantly mitigated if he's in a chaser role rather than willingly switching onto primary ballhandlers or bigger players. You can't just not switch at all, you have to be able to do it some, but with some personnel improvements it can be good enough. My thing all season is that we shouldn't be trying to be the 2024 Mavs, we should be trying to be the 2023 Nuggets. Elite, elite offense and pretty good not great defense that can make timely stops.

 

That's a bad comparison. I don't want either on a Luka team, tbh.

But, I'll say this: when the "darling" Austin is making $40 million and taking up 20 - 22 percent of the cap this season, there's a whole different expectation.

 

my main concern is that Luka is extremely high usage; we don't need another ball handler that's just standing there, waiting for his turn to handle. The one thing I like about Reaves is that he's a pretty good catch and shoot guy, but if we still have Lebron that's too many cooks in the kitchen.

LeBron has shown in these playoffs that he's still more reliable getting to the basket than Reaves and can play situational defense at a higher level.

I also don't agree with people that say this worked in regular season so it has to work in the playoffs. Playoffs are a totally different level, and we're going to be against two all-time defensive teams in the next few years.

 

Luka young athletic 3/d and lob. Won't that be like the Mavs team that went to finals?

 

Tari Eason could be a very interesting use of the cap space if Lebron leaves

 

Life is too short to argue with dumb people.