Imagining a future where the Lakers trade Ball, Ingram, Kuzma, Hart, and Zubac for Anthony Davis
Since their seems to be a fair amount of debate about how much is too much to give up for Anthony Davis, I thought it would be interesting to run out the overpay scenario and see what happens. Let's imagine for a moment, that the Lakers give up the entire young core for Anthony Davis.
First things first, what is our depth chart post trade? Well in this scenario, we don't need to send out KCP to match salaries, so we can safely assume he is still on the team, but we probably have to include Beasley to get the salaries close enough. Post trade, even if we move both our two-way guys up, we're still only at 12 players. So how do we round out the roster? Here's a safe assumption - Carmelo Anthony joins the battle. There's no doubt we would pick him up, but we would still have a glaring hole on our bench at guard. I would expect we experiment with a ten-day guy at SG. What about the G League all-time three point leader, Andre Ingram? So let's say we add Andre and one other fringe, waiver wire guard. That leaves us with the following depth chart to close out the season:
- C: McGee, Chandler, Williams
- PF: Davis, Anthony, Wagner
- SF: James, Stephenson
- SG: KCP, Svi, A. Ingram
- PG: Rondo, Waiver Guy, Bonga, Caruso
That roster is probably too thin at guard to actually win the title, but you can't tell me that it's worse than our current roster with all the young core. We wouldn't be the favorite, but any team with Lebron and AD is a contender. I would put this team one Warriors injury away from winning the whole thing.
So after making a near-finals run this season, what happens? Well, we would be sitting on an unbelievably thin roster.
- C: Moe ($2M)
- PF: Davis ($27M)
- SF: James ($37M)
- SG: Svi ($1.5M)
- PG: Bonga ($1.5M)
- Cap holds and Deng Money: Roughly $13M
- Cap space: Roughly $27M