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Lakers Expected to Pursue Reunion With NBA Champion Stretch Center
With NBA free agency negotiations opening up next week, eyes will be glued to every bit of reporting. Among the most interesting teams to watch, as usual, is the Los Angeles Lakers. LeBron James is widely expected to exercise his $52.5 million player option for the 2025-26 season, but that will make him a free agent after the season. It makes this potentially his last season with the Lakers, either via retirement or signing with another NBA team after that.
So, how the Lakers position this team is ever important if it is, in fact, James's final chance at a second title with the Lakers.
One player they are rumored to be interested in pursuing is Brook Lopez, according to Jake Fischer.
"... numerous rival teams are bracing for the center-craving Los Angeles Lakers to make a run at luring Lopez away from the Bucks," Fischer wrote in a guest post for Marc Stein's newsletter on Saturday night.
Lopez played for the Lakers for the 2017-18 season, missing the LeBron era by one year. Los Angeles acquired him in a trade, and he would go on to sign with the Milwaukee Bucks the following offseason. Lopez won a championship with the Bucks and was an important defensive piece and offensive spacer for seven seasons.
One of the things Lopez is credited with is the reinvention of his game as a big man. He went from fewer than five three-point attempts per season in the first half of his career to hundreds per season in the second half, an intentional realignment of his game with the modern philosophies of spacing and high-volume three-point shooting.
Last season, he averaged 13.0 points 5.0 rebounds and 1.8 assists per game on 50.9% shooting from the field and 37.3% shooting from beyond the arc.
Los Angeles will likely be one of many teams after the big man in free agency this year.
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Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.