Best landing spots for Kyle Lowry: LA Clippers
For the LA Clippers to trade for Kyle Lowry, they’d have to give up Pat Beverly, one of the minimum players and one of Marcus Morris or Lou Williams.
All those guys are playing serious minutes in LA’s rotation and similar to the Miami situation, Toronto hardly wants only role players. The next first-round draft pick that the Clippers can trade is their own 2027 first-round pick. Who knows what this team will look like then and maybe it’s a bit too risky to throw in a potentially juicy asset for a player so far on the wrong side of 30.
Although, if Bartelstein is just playing the game in saying his player doesn’t want to get traded while something’s secretly brewing, the Clippers’ 2027 pick is probably the most enticing asset on the table from those three teams. Maybe the Clippers don’t hate giving it up too since their star player, Kawhi Leonard has already won a title with Lowry so it’s not unimaginable that it’d be a success.
This is the rock and the hard place the Raptors might find themselves in the coming month up until the trade deadline. If Lowry signals that he wants to get traded and he names those three teams or just contenders (why wouldn’t he), they likely don’t have many future assets to give up in a returning trade.
If the question at the end of the day is a mystery Clippers pick or Matisse Thybulle in exchange for one of the best Raptors of all time and watching the player who stuck around in Toronto possibly retire there, it might not be worth it to let him go.
It’d be an unfortunate ending for Lowry if this is it, thanks to a global pandemic, the Raptors’ games are being postponed and especially since they’re playing in Tampa Bay this season, there would be no true send-off for a Toronto legend.