After swinging and missing on Klay Thompson, James Harden, and Jonas Valanciunas — three players for whom LeBron James was reportedly willing to take a significant pay cut — the Los Angeles Lakers are now out of options for making meaningful roster improvements ahead of the 2024-25 NBA season. So far, Dalton Knecht and Bronny James are the only new members to the Lakers’ roster, and as time passes, more free agents sign contracts by the hour. The Lakers are still interested in Southern California native DeMar DeRozan, but their greatest chance to make significant roster improvements may be through a trade.
According to The Athletic’s Jovan Buha, four three-and-D wings have been identified as potential trade targets for the Lakers, including one player who, in addition to LeBron James and Anthony Davis, is well-known to Lakers fans.
“Four names that have consistently been linked to the Lakers on the trade market have been Jerami Grant, Kyle Kuzma, Dorian Finney-Smith, and Cam Johnson,” said Jovan Buha of The Athletic on Wednesday. “And, as I just wrote at The Athletic, the Lakers have been in trade negotiations with Portland, Brooklyn, and Utah, among other clubs, in recent days. So the Portland and Brooklyn negotiations would coincide with those guys being on the trade market, and it’s now a matter of negotiating picks and which players are involved.”
Los Angeles will be loath to trade any first-round selections for players of this quality, limiting their ability to make a deal. However, as Portland, Brooklyn, Utah, and Washington prepare to tank the 2024-25 season with a good 2025 draft class on the horizon, each of those clubs may see the benefit of weakening their rosters ahead of the season. Could a combination of D’Angelo Russell and Jalen Hood-Schifino do the job for Kuzma? Not only would Russell be off the books at the conclusion of next season, but eliminating Kuzma off one of the league’s weakest squads appears to improve Washington’s chances of obtaining the top selection in the 2025 NBA draft.
Kuzma has averaged 20.2 points, 7.4 rebounds, and 3.8 assists per game in his three seasons with the Washington Wizards. Moving Kuzma to Los Angeles or elsewhere would allow Washington to give more minutes to young players like Bilal Coulibaly, Corey Kispert, and Patrick Baldwin Jr.
Washington Wizards forward Kyle Kuzma (33) shoots while Los Angeles Lakers forward Anthony Davis (3) defends in the second half at Capital One Arena.
Are we about to see a Kyle Kuzma-Lakers reunion?
Given the Lakers’ stated (and justifiable) reluctance to include any future first-round selections in a potential trade for Kyle Kuzma — or Grant, Finney-Smith, or Cam Johnson — a reunion appears improbable. The bitter irony is that the Lakers should never have traded Kuzma in the first place. In four seasons in Los Angeles, Kuzma averaged 15.2 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 1.9 assists. During the Lakers’ 2020 NBA title run, Kuz averaged 10 points and 3 rebounds in 23 minutes per game.
Following a first-round elimination in the 2021 NBA Playoffs, the Lakers chose to drastically restructure their roster, converting Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, and Montrezl Harrell into Russell Westbrook. Westbrook’s stay with the Lakers was both turbulent and fleeting. The combination with LeBron James and Anthony Davis never worked, and after only a season and a half, the Lakers were forced to add a 2027 first-round selection simply to get Westbrook to Utah.
A return to Lakerland would certainly be a nice change of scenery for Kuzma, who, after making the playoffs in each of his last two seasons in Los Angeles, has been toiling away on Wizards teams that have won 85 games combined over the previous three years.
