Imagine a Los Angeles Lakers team that reunites LeBron James with Kyrie Irving and features Kevin Durant. Now, that would be Showtime, wouldn’t it?
Seems far-fetched, right? Not so fast. Amid a head-spinning, “This league!” Thursday in the NBA, the idea of both Irving and Durant bolting Brooklyn for Tinseltown is apparently a possibility, according to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst.
This all comes on the heels of Durant’s reported trade request and Irving’s lingering uncertainty with the Nets.
“It has been floated to me by executives that if they would be kept together, the Lakers potentially would have a package to trade for both of them,” Windhorst said Thursday on ESPN. “It’s too fragile because we just don’t know where KD and Kyrie are if they’re still interested in (playing) together.”
Well, it sounds like they’re at least open to sticking together, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
“I’m sure it’s a scenario that’s going to appeal to them,” Wojnarowski said on ESPN, as transcribed by Bleacher Report. “They’ve wanted to play together. They want to continue to play together, but the sense they don’t want to do it together in Brooklyn anymore.”
That certainly would be something. Very much “for what it’s worth” territory, but the contracts on a swap sending Durant and Irving to LA for Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook do match up, according to the ESPN NBA trade machine. Does that get a deal done? It’s hard to say. It doesn’t feel like an especially solid return on investment for the Nets, but they don’t exactly have a ton of leverage right now. The Lakers don’t have a ton of draft assets, either, with a lot of those tied up in the Davis trade with New Orleans.
The Lakers, as of Thursday afternoon, were an intriguing 25-1 long shot at PointsBet to acquire Durant.
For now, this probably gets filed under “unlikely,” but it’s the NBA, so that doesn’t mean much until it’s actually dead.
