Los Angeles Lakers: How LA could land Zach LaVine in free agency

How the Los Angeles Lakers could make it work

As expected, with the money that the Los Angeles Lakers have on their cap sheet, landing LaVine would require serious gymnastics from Los Angeles’ cap experts in the front office. Though, anything is possible. We’ve seen teams without cap space in the past work sign-and-trades for big-money contracts (one of the most recent examples of this was when the Miami Heat acquired Jimmy Butler a couple of offseasons ago).

Perhaps the Lakers could do something similar this summer.

Obviously, the Lakers wouldn’t be able to sign LaVine into their cap space. They don’t have any of that this offseason. But it is possible to make it work in other ways.

According to Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report, the Lakers would need to do some serious cap maneuvers – and probably would need a bit of luck too.

"The only real solution would be a sign-and-trade, which presents different issues, most notably an approximate $155.7 million hard spending limit for the 2022-23 season. With just James, Davis and LaVine under contract, the Lakers would only have $36.6 million to flesh out the remainder of the roster. Keeping Westbrook and his $47.1 million is a non-starter. Even if Chicago were open to a one-to-one swap of LaVine for Westbrook (unlikely), the math wouldn’t work. With LaVine getting a significant raise, his outgoing trade value to the Bulls would be his 2021-22 salary of $19.5 million—$18.1 million short in contracts to match for Westbrook."

Pincus also adds that a third team would almost need to be willing to participate, likely to take on Westbrook.