Will the transfer of Donovan Mitchell to the Cavs have a domino effect in the league? Among the Lakers in particular, who have already had the opportunity to deal with the Jazz earlier this summer. According to the Los Angeles Timesthe Lakers aren’t opposed to approaching training camp with Russell Westbrook within the workforce. With the hope that Darvin Ham manages to remobilize the leader in defense and to use it differently in attack.
The argument in favor of this outcome is simple: if the Lakers cannot become a real contender for the title via a trade today, they can wait to see and react accordingly at the time of the “trade deadline”. The idea is obviously to avoid a bad deal which would require dropping one or two future first draft rounds to facilitate the transfer of the former MVP.
Because, still according to the daily, the cost of the departure of the former Thunder player will be very high: it will take at least one choice or two “picks” to recover several rotation players in exchange, and thus strengthen the team.
To achieve this, the two most viable options for them would be to either turn to the Pacers, by increasing their offer, to target a counterpart around the tandem Myles Turner – Buddy Hield. Or to turn to Utah which, after Rudy Gobert, has just settled its biggest summer file.
The Jazz, which has already sent Patrick Beverley (whom the Lakers think is compatible with Westbrook) to Los Angeles, needed flexibility to manage this transfer of Donovan Mitchell. The Mormon franchise will now be able to accelerate its reconstruction process by offering here and there its last valuable veterans of its workforce (Bojan Bogdanovic, Mike Conley, Jordan Clarkson…).
So many “role players”, especially for the first city, likely to attract the attention of the Lakers. The latter would then be less hesitant to exchange their first rounds of Draft 2027 and 2029 and thus convince Danny Ainge to recover Russell Westbrook…
