Lakers Trade Predictions Ahead of Thursday's Deadline

The Los Angeles Lakers have had more than half of the 2021-22 NBA season to snap out of their funk.

The fact that they haven't done it yet suggests this problem could require an external fix.

But with so much of their cap space tied up in three colossal contracts—held by LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook—there is no simple path to follow up to Thursday's 3 p.m. ET trade deadline.

For the Lakers to solve any of their problems, creativity is required. How could they go about this? Well, we're breaking out the crystal ball to form three deadline predictions for the Purple and Gold.

If Westbrook has done nothing else this season, he has at least challenged the notion that there is no such thing as an untradeable player in the NBA.

His volume numbers seem fine (18.4 points, 7.8 rebounds and 7.7 assists), but they've been stripped of all their efficiency. Shift the lens over to his advanced metrics, and you'll find some of the worst marks of his career. His minus-1.3 box plus/minus is the lowest he's ever posted. His 15.2 player efficiency rating matches the worst of his career. His .041 win shares per 48 minutes are his fewest since his rookie year.

Those marks are all troubling in a vacuum, but they become fatal flaws when attached to his towering financial figures: a $44.2 million salary for this season, plus a $47.1 million player option for the next. Teams would have a hard time simply fitting those pay rates into their budget, let alone willingly doing so while parting with anything the Lakers might want.

Theoretically, the basketball gods could drum up another Westbrook-for-John Wall swap, but the Houston Rockets would want L.A.'s 2027 first-round pick in the exchange, per Marc Stein. As much as the Lakers might want to shed Westbrook, that's a monstrous price to pay for someone who hasn't suited up this season and only played 72 games since the start of 2018-19.

Westbrook is going nowhere.

The Lakers were forced to make a decision last offseason when both Talen Horton-Tucker and Alex Caruso entered free agency. They opted to pay the former and let the latter link up with the Chicago Bulls.

The rationale, it seemed, was that the Lakers prioritized Horton-Tucker's theoretical upside, stemming largely from his age (21) and flashes of high-level ability.

This season, though, those flashes have come fewer and farther between. His shooting rates have tanked, and nothing about his stat line jumps off the page. And since he's no longer on a rookie-scale contract but on a three-year, $30.8 million pact, his growing pains aren't so easily forgiven.

All of this points to L.A. heavily shopping him this week and almost certainly getting something done with the third-year swingman. It won't net the return the Lakers surely hoped for when they thought they saw rising star potential in Horton-Tucker, but a rotation-ready, two-way player is probably enough to get a handshake agreement from the Lakers at this point.

The Lakers are operating on the league's most extreme championship-or-bust grade scale. While other teams have perhaps invested as much in their current cores, none follows the lead of a 37-year-old, as L.A. does with James.

The Lakers, then, can be reasonably expected to put all of their top trade chips on the table this week. There aren't many, but their 2027 first-round pick should interest someone, particularly since James should be long gone from the Lakers locker room at that point.

L.A. won't throw the pick into any deal—like we said, moving it for John Wall makes zero sense—but it also probably knows it can't demand a king's ransom, either.

The Lakers have shopped around a future first, Horton-Tucker and Kendrick Nunn, but "no one is biting yet," per The Ringer's Kevin O'Connor. That almost certainly won't be the package that nets a Jerami Grant type, but if it's enough for Eric Gordon, L.A. probably signs off on the swap.

Statistics used courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com. Salary information courtesy of Spotrac.