Lakers Should Focus on Brook Lopez Contract over Walker Kessler Trade amid NBA Rumors
As unpredictable as NBA offseasons can be, here's one thing you can pencil in for the 2025 version: The Los Angeles Lakers will add a big man.
Actually, go ahead and write that one down in Sharpie. Then underline and highlight it, too.
That's become a must-do task ever since the Lakers sacrificed Anthony Davis to get Luka Dončić (a move they'd make 12 times out of 10) and then backed out of a trade for Charlotte Hornets center Mark Williams. Team president Rob Pelinka has admitted as much.
L.A. has several different ways to address this vacancy, but some are more preferrable than others. A simple solution, for instance, would involve luring one-time Laker Brook Lopez back to Hollywood in free agency.
That could be doable, too, as Matt Moore of Hardwood Paroxysm noted that "most everyone I've spoken to assume Brook Lopez is gone." The Milwaukee Bucks, of course, have bigger things to worry about.
A trickier task, meanwhile, could see the Lakers reigniting their interest in young Utah Jazz center Walker Kessler. It would take a trade to get that one done, though, and trading with the Jazz is rarely (if ever) a cost-conscious endeavor.
To state it simply, if L.A. could (or wanted to) afford Kessler, he'd probably be a Southern California resident by now. The problem, as The Athletic's Jovan Buha noted, is that Utah's "asking prices tend to be higher."
"Going back to last season...they had inquired about him to the Jazz, and the feedback they got was the starting price, not the final price. The starting price was the equivalent of two-plus first-round picks," Buha said.
Meeting—or merely approaching—that price would effectively exhaust the Lakers' of their non-Austin Reaves trade assets. They have a 2031 first-rounder to trade, but otherwise it's future pick swaps, a single second-rounder, 2024 first-round pick Dalton Knecht and expiring contracts (like Rui Hachimura, Gabe Vincent and Maxi Kleber).
So, if the Lakers could even get Kessler, that'd probably be all they could do on the trade market. And for as much as his rim protection and interior finishing would help, this team is more than a starting-caliber center away from contending for a championship next season.
The Lakers would still have defensive holes on the perimeter, for instance, and general concerns about their overall depth. They'd be an imperfect team, in other words.
Adding Lopez, on the other hand, would allow L.A. to address this issue without denying itself the opportunity to make other upgrades. He could drum up decent-ish interest among win-now shoppers with question marks at center, but this shouldn't be some kind of bidding war. He's 37 years old, was never the fleetest of foot and is merely a complementary contributor as a scorer and rebounder.
He's also notably not the kind of anti-gravity lob-crusher Dončić might prefer. Having said that, Lopez's ability to stretch the floor would make Dončić's life easier in a different way. Lopez is on a nine-year run of averaging at least 1.4 three-pointers, and he has converted a healthy 35.4 percent of his long-range looks during this stretch.
He remains a stingy paint protector, too. This past season, opponents shot 5.4 percentage points worse against him than they did on average on looks within six feet of the basket, per NBA.com. He isn't the kind of all-purpose stopper who'd extinguish fires all over the defensive end, but he could still clean up a lot of mistakes along the back line.
Again, though, this isn't simply an argument of Lopez over Kessler. In that vacuum debate, Kessler would clearly be the preferred pick.
It's once you start adding in the optionality (or lack thereof) attached to these pursuits that gives Lopez the edge. If the Lakers could sign Lopez, find another athletic wing defender or two and boost their bench a bit, that would be a far more productive offseason than simply swinging a costly trade for Kessler.
