Lakers Rumors: The Purple and Gold Won't Win a Title Without Dwight Howard

The Los Angeles Lakers may not like the price they'll have to pay to acquire Dwight Howard in a trade, but it's time they acknowledged the alternative—they aren't going to win a title without him anyway.

The team is 10-8, though they're a boring 10-8, which wouldn't be such a big deal in other years but certainly is when Lob City has taken Los Angeles by storm.

The Lakers, for the first time in a long time, aren't the marquee basketball item in Los Angeles.

But questions also remain about whether this team is truly a championship-caliber squad. They lack a good point guard, Pau Gasol seems unhappy with his role in new coach Mike Brown's offense and the aforementioned offense isn't doing a whole lot, as Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Times has noted.

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The importance of settling this goes beyond appeasing Gasol. The Lakers haven't scored 100 points for 11 consecutive games. They've made a league-worst 25.6 percent of their three-point shots.

And though Kobe Bryant has led the league in scoring (30.6), Bynum remains inconsistent with battling double teams.  Meanwhile, Gasol has averaged 13.8 points on 40.8 percent shooting in the past five games, a steep dropoff from his career averages of 18.7 points per game on a 52.2 percent clip.

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This simply isn't a team that is going to win a championship as currently constructed. Which brings us back to a familiar name: Dwight Howard.

As Jeff Miller of The Orange County Register wrote, a deal for the superstar center probably will come at an incredibly steep cost:

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ESPN's Chris Broussard, whose goatee knows more about basketball than we do, said Tuesday on TV that, if he were Mitch Kupchak, he would trade Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum if that's what it took to acquire Howard. In that deal, Broussard proposed, the Lakers also would receive Hedo Turkoglu.

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So, would you make that trade?

I would. And though initially frightened by the prospect of giving up so much for Howard, Miller also relented.

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What was feared preseason now is being realized in-season. These Lakers, as constructed—or destructed—just aren't good enough anymore.

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The Lakers need to make that deal, concede this season and rebuild a contender around Kobe Bryant and Howard next season. Bringing in Deron Williams would be a possibility, and suddenly the Lakers would be relevant again.

Because right now, they seem like a decent, boring team.

And that's just not what the Lakers are supposed to be all about.

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