Lakers News: Longtime Star Trade Target Jokes About Joining LA Next Season
Seven-time Portland Trail Blazers All-Star point guard Damian Lillard, a longtime trade target for your Los Angeles Lakers, stoked the fire of a million message boards last week when he took to his Instagram and cracked wise about being flipped to LA this summer.
In the video, Lillard jokes to an offscreen friend about how he imagines basketball media members want their interactions with him to go during the 2023 offseason.
"'Where [are] you going this summer?' [Lillard imagines a journalist asking him.] They want me to be like, 'I'm going to the Lakers... I'm going to the Lakers, bruh,'" Lillard joked.
Lillard infamously did have a conversation with Lakers stars Anthony Davis and LeBron James during the summer of 2021 about possibly forcing his way to town via trade, but ultimately demurred. The two LA stars then apparently turned their attention to All-Star small forward DeMar DeRozan, a Compton native and USC product. DeRozan thought a deal was in place for him to be moved to Los Angeles through a sign-and-trade with his then-team, the San Antonio Spurs, only to discover that the Lakers had instead traded for Long Beach native Russell Westbrook.
Though Westbrook had been the 2017 MVP on the Oklahoma City Thunder, he was by this point in his career a far inferior player to DeRozan, and immediately tanked the team due to his deficiencies. The Lakers improved mightily just by offloading his money this past February, and promptly went on an 18-9 run to close out the regular season, before making it all the way to the Western Conference Finals via their revamped roster.
Adding Lillard, who'll be 33 in July, at this stage in his career wouldn't quite be a Westbrookian-level mistake, since he's a better shooter and a far more clutch late-game player, but a "Big Three" lineup featuring three 30+ year-old vets, when only one of those three plays defense during the regular season (as we saw, LeBron James is still capable of summoning huge defensive performances once the calendar turns to April), would be a mistake.
Surrounding the Lakers' Big Two of Davis and James with role players who can either shoot or defend multiple positions, with some supplemental ball handling to take a bit of pressure off James, is the recipe that got LA back to the Western Conference Finals after a three-year layoff. Star-chasing, unless that star is literally Jimmy Butler or Kawhi Leonard, just seems like a dangerous game at this stage in the aging James' career.
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