Lakers News: Russell Westbrook Selling Brentwood Home

Could mean nothing, could mean everything.

Current Los Angeles Lakers point guard Russell Westbrook appears to be ready to leave L.A. -- or, at least, Brentwood.

Per E.B. Solomont of the Wall Street Journal, Westbrook is fixing to turn quite a profit as he plans to offload his 13,500 square-foot mansion in the cosy neighborhood, near his old UCLA stomping grounds.

The Long Beach native first purchased the six-bedroom house in 2018 while still an All-Star with the Oklahoma City Thunder, for the hefty sum of $19.75 million. Now, he's listing the estate for a whopping $29.995 million. The housing market had been in a boom period since late 2020, though in Los Angeles it has been declining somewhat since July.

Westbrook's current digs sure come with all the fixings: in addition to all those bedrooms, the pad also boasts a movie theater, a gym, a wine room, and a bar because who would want to drink their wine room wine in said wine room?

The nine-time All-Star's impending move does not necessarily mean he anticipates he's headed out of town any time soon. L.A. has been his offseason home for a while now. He previously owned a more "modest" $4.625 million house in Beverly Hills from 2014-2020, and had an 8,398 square-foot Oklahoma mansion that he also apparently sold around 2020. The listed price at the time was $1.3 million. He also sold his smaller OKC "starter home" in 2020, to the tune of a reported $383,500.

Westbrook can certainly afford all these dynamite spots. To date, he has netted $288.6 million in salary alone, per Spotrac. Given Westbrook's diverse portfolio of endorsement deals and his burgeoning side hustle in fashion, it seems safe to safe that his bank account is fairly robust.

Reading tea leaves from real estate transactions could be something of a fool's errand. Certainly, after Westbrook split with his longtime agent Thad Foucher earlier this summer, it appeared that the pair couldn't agree on best strategies for Westbrook's future during the final $47.1 million season of his expiring contract. Foucher expressed in a statement to Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN that he wanted Westbrook to play out the final year of his deal in L.A., rather than risk being traded to another club and subsequently bought out. Foucher believed, probably correctly, that taking the latter approach would kill the 2017 league MVP's future value in the NBA marketplace.

Thanks to this latest move and Westbrook's hiring of Excel Sports agent Jeff Schwartz, it certainly may seem like the 6'3" vet is hoping to be traded elsewhere. Thanks to the Lakers' trade for Patrick Beverley, another veteran point guard who should be a better fit with their roster, it sure seems like a divorce would be a mutual decision. But it appears that L.A. remains reticent to give up both its 2027 and 2029 first-round draft picks to move off of Westbrook's money, the second-priciest contract in the league.

Maybe all this means is that Westbrook just wants to relocate elsewhere in L.A. County. But then again, maybe not.