NBA Trade Rumors: Lakers desperately need to trade Russell Westbrook
NBA Trade Rumors: The Los Angeles Lakers need to do whatever they can to trade Russell Westbrook at the trade deadline.
The Los Angeles Lakers are a mess and may finally be broken. LeBron James and Anthony Davis look like broken players on the bench at the end of games and Russell Westbrook is being benched in fourth quarters. Worse than all, the Lakers are four games under .500 and at 26-30, find themselves 9th in the Western Conference standings.
On trade deadline day, the immediate future looks grim for the Lakers and they desperately need to make some move in order to inject some hope back into this franchise. I’m not sure that can possibly be accomplished with inactivity at the deadline.
The big problem, of course, is that the Lakers don’t have much to work with. They don’t have a ton of draft assets they could flip and don’t have many contracts that would fall under the category of tradeable.
LeBron is not getting traded and neither is AD. After that, the other two tradeable assets are Talen Horton-Tucker, who has not played great this season, and Kendrick Nunn, who hasn’t played at all this season.
Then, there’s Westbrook.
Westbrook is on a terrible contract but is absolutely the player that should be traded at the deadline. He should’ve never been traded for in the first place, but because they decided to do so, the front office now has to take their medicine.
With just a few hours left before the trade deadline, the Lakers need to do everything they can possibly do to trade Westbrook. If that’s attaching their only draft asset, the Lakers need to do so. If that’s attaching every other possible asset on the roster (save for LeBron and AD), the Lakers need to do it.
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The Lakers are in a desperate place but they need to do whatever they can to reverse the mistake that they made last offseason. The Lakers can’t enter the offseason with Westbrook on the roster. The front office needs to do what they can to get rid of this problem before this one move effectively wastes two years of LeBron’s career.