The Lakers considered trading Kyle Kuzma at the 2020 NBA trade deadline. The exact packages aren’t clear, but the they reportedly mulled deals for players like Marcus Morris and Derrick Rose before ultimately deciding to take Kuzma off the table.
It was somewhat of a controversial decision at the time. Kuzma’s uneven third season made his place in the playoff rotation unclear. LeBron James looked like an MVP candidate, but at 35-years-old, nobody knew how much longer that would be the case. Championship opportunities are rare, and fortune favors the bold. Teams rarely win titles by accident. They win them through decisive action. The 2020 Lakers chose patience.
And they won the championship anyway. To any dismayed by their decision not to trade for Kyle Lowry on Thursday, that idea is a slight comfort. Keeping Kuzma may ultimately fuel their repeat bid this postseason. He has since blossomed into exactly the sort of player the Lakers hoped he would when they chose to keep him. In that instance, Rob Pelinka’s faith was rewarded.
It would be naive to assume that didn’t factor into Pelinka’s decision not to include Talen Horton-Tucker in Lowry negotiations Thursday. The Pelinka-Frank Vogel partnership has been defined by such decisions. The Lakers believe in their own players. They trusted Kuzma to grow. They kept Rajon Rondo in the playoff rotation after two miserable regular seasons. The organization is high on Horton-Tucker. They expect the same leap that Kuzma made, and betting on that leap was perhaps more predictable than it might seem. But the two situations aren’t identical.
Kuzma was as battle-tested as a third-year pro without playoff experience could be by the 2020 trade deadline. He’d endured a couple of years of rumors and survived a regime change. Horton-Tucker has played only 816 minutes in his entire career. Kuzma nearly tripled that in his rookie season alone. The Lakers made an educated guess on his future. They had years of tape to rely upon. Horton-Tucker doesn’t have that tape. He has flashes of potential interspersed with weeks of frustration.
That’s predictable for a 20-year-old. Kuzma didn’t hit his stride until he turned 25. By the time Horton-Tucker is 25, LeBron will be 40, and as incredible as his defiance of Father Time has been, it seems safe to say that he will no longer be the best player in the NBA by that point. James’ window isn’t going to close tomorrow, but it has to close soon. It’s going to close before Horton-Tucker becomes the player he will ultimately become, the one Kuzma has already become.
That may not impede him from contributing to this season’s title defense. He’s in the rotation already, after all. But Lowry is an All-Star right now, and even with the 2020 title in their back pocket, the Lakers might have been well served to add another for a repeat bid in 2021. They didn’t have to face an opponent as fierce as the Nets in the Orlando bubble. Lowry would’ve given them a trio capable of matching three-headed monster in Brooklyn. He’d have solved almost every issue this Lakers team has. Need more shooting? Lowry is hovering around 40 percent on 3-pointers this season. Bench lineups struggling without LeBron? Lowry-led bench units have dominated for the past half-decade. Want to switch more on defense? Few guards in all of basketball handle bigger wings as well as Lowry does.
These are all things that the Lakers hope Horton-Tucker can one day match, but right now, he’s a 25 percent 3-point shooter learning the ropes on defense. He might not remain in the rotation when it tightens in the postseason. Lowry would’ve been the third-best Laker this postseason. He just might not have stayed that way for very much longer.
Lowry is 35-years-old, closer to James in age than every rotation player on the Lakers not named Marc Gasol. He will be a free agent this offseason and reportedly wants a hefty two-year, $50 million extension. That’s not particularly expensive to a team currently haggling with Dennis Schroder over a new deal that could reach $100 million, but it’s an investment in a fleeting present. Adding Lowry would have made the Lakers overwhelming 2021 championship favorites, but it would have shortened their window drastically. That’s something Pelinka has never done. Even beyond the decisions to keep Horton-Tucker and Kuzma, his recent moves have all been geared toward longevity.
After all, despite similar halfcourt offensive struggles last season, he used his two biggest roster-building tools this offseason on non-shooters. Schroder is a ball-dominant point guard that is making only 31.7 percent of his 3’s this season. That’s hardly an ideal fit next to James. Montrezl Harrell’s pick-and-roll game is a bit more comfortable alongside LeBron, though he’s not the lob threat James typically favors. Both are 27 years old. Anthony Davis is 28.
Davis is a player worth extending a window for, but it’s worth asking just how open that window is going to be when James’ prime ends. After all, the Lakers might not even win it all this season with him still at close to peak form. Is a team built around Davis, Schroder, Kuzma and Horton-Tucker championship quality? It might have to be, because keeping that core together won’t leave much flexibility. Schroder wants at least $20 million per year. Kuzma is already on a market-value contract, and Horton-Tucker will get paid in restricted free agency as well. If Harrell and Alex Caruso are extended as well, max cap space is probably out of the picture for the foreseeable future.
Inadvertently, that’s a problem Lowry could have solved. He only wanted a two-year extension. That would’ve aligned his deal with LeBron’s. The two could’ve expired together in 2023, and with Schroder and Horton-Tucker gone in the Lowry deal, they wouldn’t have had to extend them in the first place. That would’ve set 2023 up as the target for a soft reboot, max cap space around Davis to build a new contender rather than hoping that the remnants of an old one can last.
That turned out to be an unpalatable degree of uncertainty for the Lakers even with Davis locked into a five-year deal. For all we know, Davis insisted on the addition of younger role players as a condition of that commitment. Ultimately, we can only see the path the Lakers chose to take, and the one that they didn’t. They chose stability over risk, a cracked window vs. a revolving door. They chose the future over the present.
It’s what Pelinka has consistently done with the Lakers. So far, it has worked. But that approach has never been tested by a more invested juggernaut. The Nets didn’t pull any punches when they landed their third star. The Lakers did. Last year, the trade they didn’t make ultimately wound up being one of the reasons they won the championship. This season, it might be the reason why they didn’t.