2023-24 Team Developments: Trades / Free Agents / News / Rumors / Ideas

A rim running center who could rebound and protect the rim would be fine. We don't necessarily need what AD provides on the offensive side, especially with his inconsistency and fragility. Watch, Lebron is going to become more and more of an inside player at this stage of his career. Reaves also does the majority if his damage in the paint and getting and 1s. Lakers could get some better shooting for sure.

 

I'd say a request up to 24 to 25 mil a year.

 

Sure. My point of clarification was that this would be at the high end of maybe a fair deal based on what can be expected out of him going forward, when the wording in the first paragraph of your post sounded a bit like something had changed with a report that he would maybe be asking less than 30M or above to start the negotiations.

 

Trading AD away for a package of a few good players and picks will make us a first round exit. Just check out Brooklyn for evidence.

Why would we want that?

Trading AD away for picks and tanking doesn’t guarantee success either. We had 4 years in a row of high picks and couldn’t even make the playoffs.

I also don’t get the, AD isn’t a player to build around? He can literally anchor you to a top 5 defense on his own while being a positive player on O. I just don’t get it.

 

Gotcha.

No nothing new that I’ve seen. I worded it that way based off earlier articles that stated he wanted around that amount from Minnesota

 

Yeah. I don’t get the thought of gutting a team that just got the western conference finals.

 

this. I trade AD (with his blessing) if lebron retired or asked out. Or for Luka. Otherwise…nope. People acting like he’s not a generational talent and that if you just get three straight lotto picks, you’ll get someone as good. Have you not followed basketball—even just lakers basketball—for the past two decades?

 

What I’m saying is the dude is the best defensive player in the game and a top five player in the League when on fire on offense. They aren’t trading him for a bunch of lesser pieces and picks- that would be just dumb. It ain’t happening.

 

You still need to answer the question. Who are you trading for while shipping out AD?

 

Derozan and Vucevic


But yea, ADs not gonna get traded this offseason, come on now.

 

Just look back to what happened when we traded Shaq. We got some pieces and were stuck in the wilderness until we got gifted Gasol by chance.

If Lebron retires and AD is traded, we’ll be trying to bottom out and watching Reaves by himself. Nah, I’m good.

 

That kind of talent doesn’t grow on hands while having birds in the bush.

 

Some good news from Stein regarding Kyrie

 

I wonder if Toronto would do a DLo and Beasley for VanVleet and Gary Trent sign and trade

 

that's a lot of moving parts. for it to work for us, both trent and fvv have to opt in to their last year. then dlo has to agree to a contract that would allow him + beasley to be swapped (and he'd have to agree to go to toronto).

on paper, i could make it make sense for both teams, but i still think it's easier to just keep who we've got.

 

I do think it would be less complicated than most similar deals since both the Raptors guys are Klutch.

 

And is on an upward trajectory.

 

They are out there. We are just not at the stage where there are any real obvious options yet. In a vacuum, Davis/Beasley for Lillard/Nurkic would make sense for example. Not sure Portland would still be in win now mode though if they trade Dame, so a multi-team might be needed for that. Then there would be the help Dame option, where we could get back a haul of young players, (e.g. AD/#17 for Simons/Nurkic/#3). But of course there is stuff behind the scenes that the general public does not know about, in terms of potential trades. We don't know how Rob feels about Scoot or the Miller kid. There may also be a mystery player that they would like to trade up for. In 2018, Lakers were high on Simons and worked him out, but Portland took him with the pick before us. We ended up selecting Mo Wagner. Let me just say that I remember back in 1996 when the Lakers were facing a significant amount of scrutiny from fans for trading their starting center for an 17-year old guard. Now, Vlade was obviously not the caliber player that AD is, but he was really good, and the fans did not think the trade made any sense. Obviously the situations are different and such, but a lot of Vlade stans were eating crow for that.

 

This makes a ton of sense. I dont have any advanced stats on them but...I mean, you don't know if FVV or Trent's jumper is going to disintegrate when they get here, but at least they generate steals on the defensive end, and appear to generally be better defensive players than Dlo/Beasley.