Brooklyn Nets must remember that the Lakers are more desperate to pair up LeBron James and Anthony Davis with Kyrie Irving than them getting rid of the latter.
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LeBron James and Anthony Davis are the NBA’s top 75 players of all time. Both the Lakers superstars are capable enough to lead franchises as they have the IQ, skills, consistency, and dominance that only limited players possess in the league.
But those very things have been put into questioning for the last two years with Davis being the major culprit who has failed to keep himself fit and missed more than 50% of the regular-season games for the Purple and Gold. While James has been quite better, he has not been the Ironman he used to be before 2020.
And the result, as we know, saw them getting knocked out of the first round of the playoffs last season. To top that, they did not even qualify for the Play-in tournament this past season, let alone the Playoffs.
An ESPN analyst believes the duo is incapable of leading a decent squad deep into the post-season, and so the Los Angeles Lakers should be the ones who must be worried more than anyone else.
“Lakers have LeBron James and AD? Guess what? That’s not enough to win the championship!”: Zach Lowe
Even if James is 2-3 years older than the time the 2019-20 season started and ended with the Lakers winning the championship, there is no denying the fact that if he and AD stay fit throughout an entire season, they need a few decent role players to win to lift the Larry O’Brien.
But that is too big of a gamble to play on a 37-year-old who is still at the top of the game but will be 38 by the time the Playoffs come and a tremendous player who cannot be trusted to come back to play the next game.
ESPN’s Zach Lowe believes it is the Lakers’ responsibility to get rid of Russell Westbrook to get the duo another big star whom everyone around LA or Kyrie Irving’s camp wants it to be Kyrie. And so, the Nets should be the ones who are at the top of this one of the most desirable and talked about trades this off-season.
He is not entirely wrong in that assessment, and if Irving is as desirable as the reports suggest – Mavs and Sixers’ interests in him, the Nets should not gamble on pairing Ben Simmons with Westbrook at all.
