Despite the Suns and Kevin Durant stealing the headlines, the Lakers are still trying to do their thing

Trading for Russell Westbrook isn’t the only reason the Los Angeles Lakers have disappointed so dramatically the past two seasons. The list of other contributing factors includes but is not limited to the injuries that have cost LeBron James and Anthony Davis a combined 103 games since the start of 2021-22; the ill-fated decision to pay Talen Horton-Tucker rather than Alex Caruso and a pair of free-agent signing periods that produced two separate crops of rotation-fillers — one mostly old, one mostly young — who couldn’t really shoot.

So much of what has ailed L.A., though, traces back to the Westbrook trade — to general manager Rob Pelinka and the rest of the Lakers’ brain trust responding to a disappointing first-round exit at the hands of the Suns in 2021 by deciding to swap about half of a rotation (Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Montrezl Harrell, plus the 22nd pick in the 2021 NBA Draft, which became Pacers big man Isaiah Jackson) for one former MVP.

In pursuit of a durable, star-level playmaker who could theoretically ease the ball-handling and shot-creation burden on James and Davis and who might be able to help keep the team afloat if (when) one of the two megastars misses games, the Lakers sacrificed the identity that won them the 2020 championship. In one fell swoop, L.A. went from a team that could surround James and Davis with size, shooters and athletic defenders to one that … well, one that had Westbrook, who’d already been traded twice (by Oklahoma City for Chris Paul and by Houston for John Wall) since the start of his supermax contract extension and who was owed $91.3 million through 2023, ensuring that Pelinka & Co. would have to shop in the bargain bin for the bulk of the Lakers’ roster.

Consolidation begat corrosion. No matter who was coaching, whether Westbrook was playing with James and Davis or flying solo, whether he was starting or coming off the bench — a role that, to his credit, Westbrook eventually accepted and attacked with characteristic vigor — the pieces never quite fit. The Lakers haven’t been over .500 in 13 months, entered Wednesday in 13th in the West and are in danger of sending the Pelicans a top-five pick in the 2023 NBA Draft.

Again: That’s not all on Westbrook. The trade that made him a Laker, though, was the original sin … and on Wednesday, the Lakers might have found a measure of redemption.

Westbrook is off to Utah — very briefly, one suspects — as the biggest name in a three-team, eight-player, four-draft-pick trade … and, arguably, its least consequential part. (Chris Haynes of Turner Sports reports that if and when the Jazz buy out the remainder of Westbrook’s contract, he could land with the Clippers or Bulls.) The Lakers effectively reversed the initial Westbrook deal, turning his $47.1 million expiring contract into three players on smaller deals — prodigal son D’Angelo Russell from the Timberwolves and Malik Beasley and Jarred Vanderbilt from the Jazz — who add shooting, rebounding, energy and depth to an L.A. roster in desperate need of all of the above.

Absolution, as always, comes at a cost. The Lakers’ much-ballyhooed 2027 first-round draft pick — one of the last remaining premium assets in the cupboard in L.A. after the past couple of blockbusters — is now under the control of war-chest-stuffing Jazz CEO Danny Ainge. Yet the cost wasn’t nearly as dear as it could be: After reportedly indicating to other teams that the price tag for Vanderbilt and Beasley would be “the equivalent of a first-round pick for each player,” Utah sent them both to the Lakers and veteran point guard Mike Conley to the Timberwolves for one total first — a protected pick, at that, which the Lakers will keep if it lands in the top four of the 2027 draft and will convert into a second-round pick that same year if it doesn’t convey.

Given Utah’s reported valuations, that doesn’t seem like much of a haul. If you never actually expected Ainge to get as many firsts for three sub-star players as he did for Donovan Mitchell, though, then getting one Laker pick four years out — two years after James and Davis are scheduled to hit free agency, when absolutely everything about the NBA and the fabric of reality could be drastically different — that could rise as high as fifth overall seems all right.

Add the $35.5 million in guaranteed 2023-24 salary they offloaded by moving Conley, Beasley and Vanderbilt and the fact that Westbrook, Damian Jones and Juan Toscano-Anderson are all on expiring contracts, and the Jazz have effectively cleared the books. Right now, the only Jazz players on non-rookie deals that extend beyond the end of next season are Lauri Markkanen, who just made his first All-Star team and is the foundational piece of whatever comes next, and Collin Sexton, who, with Conley moving on, seems poised to get the keys to Will Hardy’s motion offense with a chance to prove he can be Utah’s starting point guard of the future.

The Jazz can open up as much as $60 million in salary-cap space this summer; they can use it to sign players or, more likely, rent it out to teams looking to get off money, granting them a contractual “get out of jail free” card … so long as it comes attached to more draft picks and/or young players to add to a cache that now includes 15 firsts over the next seven years to go with Markkanen, Sexton and rookies Walker Kessler and Ochai Agbaji. What Ainge, general manager Justin Zanik & Co. can turn all that into remains to be seen. As a starting point for a rebuild, though, it doesn’t sound half-bad.

How the Timberwolves’ end of things sounds probably depends on what you want to hear. While Russell played an important role in Minnesota’s playoff run last season and in helping the Wolves settle down after a rocky start to the Rudy Gobert era, he and the team were reportedly far apart in talks on a contract extension, and he’s set to hit unrestricted free agency. While Russell has found his shooting stroke the past two months, the hoped-for offensive chemistry between him and Gobert never really materialized. Among 69 partnerships that have run at least 250 pick-and-rolls this season, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking, Russell-Gobert ranks 47th in points produced per chance; the Wolves have scored only 109.9 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with them sharing the floor, according to Cleaning the Glass, which would rank 29th in the league over the full season.

Enter Conley, who spent three years developing that chemistry with Gobert — the two ran more than 3,000 pick-and-rolls together in that span, according to Second Spectrum — and eventually found a rhythm that helped consistently propel the Jazz to the top of the offensive charts.

“I had to change my game a lot to dictate how to get him the ball and use him the best we can,” Conley recently told The Athletic. “It worked, and we got it to work, and it just takes time, and everybody’s got to be patient.”

Patience isn’t necessarily a virtue you can afford, though, when you’ve given up more than a half-decade’s worth of draft capital for a piece who isn't fitting quite right. So team president Tim Connelly went out and got Gobert’s old pick-and-roll partner, whose 7.7 assists per game rank seventh in the NBA this season, who has a pristine 4.46-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio, who’s shooting 36.2% from deep this season and whose modest usage rate creates space for ascendant offensive force Anthony Edwards to occupy an even larger role in Minnesota’s attack — which, given how dynamic and productive Edwards has been the past few months, ought to be a net positive.

On top of that, importing Conley’s $24.4 million salary for next season ensures that a Wolves team that’s slated to be capped out next season keeps a sizable salary slot open, a vital team-building tool for facilitating further moves and adding more talent when you’re over the cap. You might remember the Warriors turning Kevin Durant’s exit to Brooklyn into a sign-and-trade that brought back Russell, in part to keep open the salary slot. That proved prescient when, midway through Russell’s first year in Golden State, Golden State flipped him to … Minnesota, getting back Andrew Wiggins, who’d go on to play a huge role in the Warriors’ 2022 title run.

In exchange for taking on a player more than nine years older than Russell and with $14.3 million more guaranteed for next season than free-agent-to-be Russell, the Wolves get back three second-round picks and the right to take a flier on Nickeil Alexander-Walker, a 6-foot-6 shooting guard who has shown flashes as a shooter and playmaker in New Orleans and Utah but has yet to carve out a consistent niche in four pro seasons. He’s headed for restricted free agency this summer; if he pops over the next couple of months, Minnesota can keep him around at what ought to be a marginal cost.

The general idea: Conley sprinkles some veteran-presence pixie dust on the roster, helps unlock the full version of Gobert that Connelly thought he was getting and proves capable of smoothing out the rough patches between Gobert and Karl-Anthony Towns once he’s back from injury. That, plus Edwards’ ongoing insistence on All-Star status and steady play from the likes of Kyle Anderson, Taurean Prince and a returning Jordan McLaughlin, is enough to get the Wolves where they hoped they’d be before the season.

As the first half showed, though, Connelly’s brightest ideas might not always pan out; there’s a world in which the Conley-Gobert pairing looks less like the fire of old and more just plain old, and nothing saves the Towns-Gobert partnership, and suddenly Minnesota’s staring down the barrel of trading Towns to try to further retrofit the roster around Gobert in what starts to look suspiciously like the old Jazz, with Edwards playing the role of an increasingly angry Mitchell. That glass-half-full scenario would make for an awfully cold spring and summer in the Twin Cities.

For one of their top two assets — well, beyond James or Davis, that is — the Lakers got what could be a healthy upgrade to a team that sits 1.5 games out of 10th in the West, ranks an underwhelming 18th on offense and 21st on defense, according to Cleaning the Glass, and hasn’t been all that good even when its two superstars are out there. With James and Davis on the court together: The Lakers are outscoring opponents by less than one point per 100 possessions. They’ve defended at a top-five rate in those minutes, but the offense has lagged, thanks largely to the ongoing lack of those “lasers” that James lamented early in the season. The new arrivals ought to help that front.

Beasley has become one of the highest-volume 3-point shooters in the league. He has launched 11.6 triples per 36 minutes of floor time the past two seasons; among players who’ve played at least 1,500 minutes in that span, the only one putting them up more often is Stephen Freaking Curry. Beasley’s not Curry — he’s shooting 35.9% from deep this season — but his ability to fire off the catch or on the move, working off the ball and sprinting off screens, ought to inject more dynamism and variety into the Lakers’ sometimes staid actions.

Russell, for his part, has been shooting the lights out of late, averaging 20.3 points and 5.8 assists per game since the start of December while hitting 56% of his 2-point shots, 43% of his 3-pointers and 90% of his free throws. He doesn’t provide the same kind of rim pressure and interior shot creation that Westbrook did, but he can be a pick-and-roll playmaking threat and secondary ball-handler next to James — who’s effectively the apex version of the kind of freight-train-to-the-rim wing destroyer that Russell has been deferring to the past couple of months.

Their ability to drill pull-up 3s — 37% this season for Beasley, 39% for Russell — should make it easier for L.A. to punish drop coverage, and they’re better bets to feast off the kinds of catch-and-shoot looks that James creates better than anyone else on the roster. Vanderbilt’s an indoor cat — though he has made a career-high 19 3s this season — who’ll make his presence felt by pounding the glass, scrounging for putbacks and guarding multiple positions on defense. He functionally played like a center for much of his time in Minnesota and Utah, but he’ll add some size (6-foot-9 with a 7-foot-1 wingspan) and athleticism on the wing.

They provide some optionality off the court, too. Beasley has a team option for next season, and Vanderbilt will make just $4.7 million. Russell’s due a new deal; the Lakers can offer him a two-year, $67.5 million extension if they want. They could let it ride, though — see how Russell fares alongside James and Davis and if Russell’s second stint in L.A. seems like a better fit than the first time around. If all goes well, they can use his Bird rights to pay him more than any other team; if they decide to move on, they can create north of $32 million to go after another point guard. I hear there’s one who just got to Texas and who’ll be a free agent this summer whom James knows pretty well.

As rare as this sort of dramatic, midstream restructuring is for a lot of teams, it’s not unfamiliar for James; in fact, five years ago to the day, his Cavaliers underwent a massive facelift. That team was struggling, too, having lost nine of 13 to fall seven games behind the East-leading Celtics, and the vibes were becoming increasingly rancid … so on Feb. 8, 2018, Cleveland pulled off three separate trades that shipped out six players and brought back four — Jordan Clarkson, Larry Nance Jr., George Hill and Rodney Hood — in a complete rotational overhaul that breathed new life into a team running on fumes. The Cavs went 19-10 after the trade deadline, with the East’s third-best net rating; seven weeks later, they were in the Finals.

There are differences between that situation and this one, of course — chief among them that James was five years younger then and that even those “struggling” Cavs were eight games over .500 and in third place in the conference. Reaching that level of struggle would require these Lakers to leap over nine teams in the next two months. But while “getting into the fight for home-court advantage” might be too lofty a goal at this stage, “actually playing like the ‘team nobody wants to see in Round 1’” isn’t.

James and Davis have both looked like MVPs at different points this season. Now, for the first time in a couple of years, they’re surrounded by more shooting, size and athleticism — and Pelinka still has the 2029 first and the expiring contracts of Beverley ($13 million) and Lonnie Walker IV ($6.5 million) to dangle in the hunt for more help. It might not be enough to put the Lakers in the title chase; it is enough, though, to make them better than they’ve been since they made the ill-fated decision to bring Westbrook back to the West Coast.