More than a decade ago now, the Los Angeles Lakers had the opportunity to create one of the biggest super teams to ever grace the league. However, it was the NBA itself that stepped in and prevented the trade from happening. Recently, former NBA All-Star Gilbert Arenas broke down exactly what happened in terms of that trade and what could’ve been, had the league not stepped in.
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Gilbert Arenas dove into the Los Angeles trade that took place in 2011 during one of the episodes of Gil’s Arena. He talked about how the league intervened in the Chris Paul trade that prevented him from going to the Lakers.
“So the trade was Chris Paul was getting traded. He’s getting traded for Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, so one player for two, right? So, Lamar Odom’s going somewhere, Pau Gasol is going somewhere. Now you have Chris Paul and Kobe.
“On the back end, which no one really knew at the time was Bynum was being pushed for Dwight Howard. So, now you would have had Dwight Howard, Kobe, and Chris Paul. Which no one really gave a sh*t about that. The actual problem was after the trade was done, Lakers had 24 million dollars in cap space.”
Gilbert Arenas went on to talk about how $24 million in cap space meant two max contracts at that time. And that would’ve been a problem for the league as the Lakers could’ve brought in more superstars from around the NBA.
While Arenas may have made a solid argument, when crunching down numbers, he might not be entirely accurate. Even if Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom left and the team brought in Chris Paul, the two players had somewhat similar contracts. Gasol’s salary for the 2011 season was $18.7 million and Paul’s contract that year had a guaranteed $16.3 million.
As for Arenas’ hypothetical take, he mentioned that the Lakers would still have $24 million in cap space left even after bringing in Dwight Howard, he isn’t quite accurate there either. After all, Howard’s salary for that year was $18.09 million for the 2011-12 season.
So, to put things in perspective, if the Lakers had gotten Chris Paul, the team would’ve been far over the cap space when paying salaries to players. In fact, the Los Angeles Lakers still ended up spending $81,659,758 in salaries while the cap was set at $58,044,000 that year.
CP3’s take on missing out on the chance to play with Kobe Bryant
The entire league did not bat an eye when the Chris Paul trade to the Los Angeles Lakers got nixed. Though, if there was someone who was deeply affected by this, it was none other than the Lakers’ fanbase.
But apart from the Lakers fanbase, Chris Paul wasn’t too happy with how things went down either. While making an appearance on The Pivot Podcast, Paul finally opened up about how he felt about the trade getting vetoed.
“One of the biggest issues and why I was mad and there was a tweet that I sent out right after the trade got nixed. I said, ‘Wow.’ And a lot of people don’t know the biggest frustration was because, at this point, it was about money.”
Paul did mention how he lost out on the chance to play with the Lakers, alongside Kobe Bryant. But the trade getting vetoed ended up messing with Paul’s bird rights which could’ve gotten him an extra year while signing a new deal with the team. CP3 did mention that there were a lot of other things that played a role then but the whole ordeal did affect Paul more than it did anyone.
