If you haven’t read my earlier piece looking at the idea of the Lakers signing Chris Paul while re-signing Dwight Howard, go read it now, otherwise this post won’t make much sense. Be sure to look at the comments.

Now here’s the background for that piece. If you haven’t seen it already, Bill Simmons[1] recently wrote his annual “trade value” piece for Grantland, which is a wonderful look at player values, ranking them according to whether a team would be willing to trade Player X for another team’s Player Y. If the answer is “no,” then Player X should be ranked higher than Player Y. These articles tend to be massive — this year it was spread across three posts and I think added up to more words than the US tax code. Continue reading →

Credit: LakersNation.com

Somewhere a rumor started about the Lakers potentially clearing enough cap space to sign Chris Paul. Let’s take a look at the plausibility of this idea.

First off, let’s get the obvious red flag out of the way — it would require the Lakers to use their amnesty on Kobe Bryant. While I’m one of the people who thinks the Lakers have to at least give it some serious thought if Kobe’s going to miss the entire season (or come back late in the season and be a shell of his old self, which is more likely), this doesn’t necessarily reflect the team’s thinking on the issue.

I know many Lakers fans would say, “The Lakers would never amnesty Kobe,” talking about loyalty, one of the greatest players ever, P.R. hit, etc. If this was an ordinary year, I might be more inclined to agree with you. However, this year the Lakers are under new management. We have some track record for what the Lakers might or might not do under Jerry Buss. We have a sample size of zero to guide us with Jim Buss in charge.

So just for the sake of argument, let’s assume the Lakers WOULD be willing to amnesty Kobe in order to make this all work. Otherwise, we can just stop here. Continue reading →