LeBron James gave it his all in the Lakers’ Game 4 loss to the Denver Nuggets, which ended their season with a sweep in the Conference Finals.
James openly discussed possibly retiring from the game after the loss. Now, Lakers GM Rob Pelinka has come out and addressed the situation with LeBron to ESPN.
“We’ll look forward to those conversations when the time is right. But I will say this, LeBron has given as much to the game of basketball as anyone who’s ever played. And when you do that, you earn a right to decide whether you’re going to give more. I think sometimes we put athletes, entertainers on a pedestal, but they’re humans and just like us. They have inflection points in their career and our job as Lakers is to support any player on our team if they reach a career inflection point. … and really providing nothing but support for him. Obviously, our hope would be that his career continues, but we want to again just give him the time.”
A decision like this cannot be rushed, so the Lakers will have to hope LeBron gives them an answer about next season sooner rather than later.
Lakers Hoping To Keep Their Young Core Intact
Various members of the Lakers roster will be hitting free agency in the summer, including D’Angelo Russell, Rui Hachimura, Austin Reaves, Lonnie Walker IV, and others. Pelinka has made it clear that he wishes to keep the players on the squad next season.
“I would say this resoundingly clear, our intentions are to keep our core of young guys together and I think we saw incredible growth and achievement by Rui, Austin. I could go down the list: Vando, D-Lo. We have a lot of great young players and we want to do our best to fit the puzzle together.”
They can’t keep the young free agents and also have enough room to make a move for Kyrie Irving without giving at least one or two of them up to make salaries match. With a theory floating around that implies LeBron could be using his retirement to leverage the Lakers to make a move for Kyrie, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
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