The Lakers Had to Trade D'Angelo Russell, But It's Just Gotta Sting

D'Angelo Russell had a statement game in last night’s comeback over the Kings, scoring 27 of his 44 overall points for the evening in the fourth quarter as the Nets erased a 28-point deficit. The first thought on many people’s minds is Gee, the Lakers could use a guy like that.

Obviously, the Lakers had D’Angelo Russell in their clutches, but they traded him to the Nets in the 2017 offseason, effectively as a mechanism for dumping Timofey Mozgov’s onerous contract. This move set them up to eventually have the max contract slots on their ledger to entice LeBron James to join the Lakers.

Woj said this was the strategy at the time, over a year before LeBron took his talents to Tinseltown:

Everything worked according to plan, except for the fact that LeBron’s first season with the Lakers tailspinned into a massive disappointment after he sustained a groin injury on Christmas Day against the Warriors (they also may or may not have ghosted Paul George). Taken with that, Russell’s blossoming towards becoming a superstar in his fourth year in the league has to sting Lakers fans and their front office to their core.

Who knows if Russell ever turns into this good of a player with the Lakers? In his two seasons there he was a guy who played about 28 minutes a game and scored 14-15 points with 3-5 assists. We see time and again that athletes across sports can manufacture slights to motivate themselves; Russell has all the motivation in the world to prove the Lakers wrong for trading him.

Again, the Lakers probably had to trade Russell in order to present an enticing situation for LeBron. But let’s imagine a world where they are teammates? Do we really think, given how LeBron has failed to gel basketball-wise and from a temperament perspective with the Lakers’ young players, this pairing would have worked?

At this point, we have to see if LeBron, Magic Johnson, Rob Pelinka, and Jeanie Buss can lure another blue-chip player to the Lakers this offseason. It doesn’t seem right now like Kawhi Leonard or Kevin Durant are walking through that door. Perhaps their trade offer for Anthony Davis surpasses everyone else’s and that deal finally gets done, but in order for this LeBron experiment to be worthwhile they’re going to need another star.

If you’re a Laker hater it’s kind of funny that D’Angelo Russell could well be That Guy when they already had him and moved on, but the Lakers probably had to make that move to get LeBron to go there in the first place.