The Los Angeles Lakers were expected to be very active ahead of the 2022 trade deadline, but they shocked everybody and decided to keep their roster untouched, at least until they acquired a free agent in the buyout market.
A Russell Westbrook trade was on the table for the Lakers, and at some point, the Lakers were trying to deal the 2017 NBA MVP to the Houston Rockets in exchange for John Wall. However, that never came to fruition, with Rob Pelinka stating the team didn’t feel the need to make any change, even claiming that LeBron James and Anthony Davis supported that decision.
Almost a week later, we still keep talking about the Lakers and learning more facts about the failed negotiation between the two teams. ESPN’s Dave McMenamin and Ramona Shelburne joined Brian Windhorst to discuss this potential trade, revealing more options the Lakers had to acquire Wall.
McMenamin said that they could also get Christian Wood in the deal, but we all know how things went (via Silver Screen and Roll).
McMenamin: “There was an iteration of the John Wall trade that included Christian Wood that would have involved more money. I’ve been told from other sources in Houston that there was a message that the Lakers were not willing to take on more money.”
Shelburne: “That’s kind of the word around the league that the Lakers were making calls, if there was a trade that made sense, they would do it. I’ve heard it described as ‘maybe half-hearted efforts.’ They would do something if it was low-hanging fruit but they weren’t really willing to feel any pain, whether that was luxury tax money, whether that was more encumberment in the future, whether that was draft compensation. In other words, they called, they tried to do some things but there wasn’t a sense of the same kind of urgency I think you heard from the players the night of the Milwaukee game and especially after the Portland game.”
In the conversation, they also revealed that the Lakers could swap draft picks with the Rockets, meaning they could have shipped Russell Westbrook to H-Town without compromising their first-rounder.
It seems like the front office doesn’t want to give up on the Russell Westbrook experiment and will give it another chance. They want to add another piece via the buyout market, but it’s hard to find a piece that could have the same impact as John Wall would have.
