How delusional! You don't give up the greatest big man in the game (at the time) and say you would have done just as well. They're also pretending like they couldn't have made other improvements to the roster without dealing O'Neal and getting rid of him was the only reason they had success later? LOL
They got pau gasol for dog****, i think they could have still ponied up dog****. And if they couldn't have, they'd have been left with the draft rights to marc, on well, sucks to them
Grizzlies got the rights to Marc Gasol in the Pau Gasol trade, the one fact that people have tried to use years later to justify the trade, even though it was indefensible at the time.
and look at memphis now as of late. they have been a top team in the league and Marc turned into a top level center in the league while the Lakers have now been one of the worst teams
At the time the trade was so lopsided, Grizz got lucky gasol panned out. Lakers got 2 ships out of it though
Yeah, but did anybody dream that Marc would be so good? Did anybody, including the Lakers think that trading a second rounder little brother for an all-star big man was a fair trade?
Insider stories can be accessed by everyone. I only know this because another poster on this site brought attention to it once. Something about putting ".uk" somewhere in the URL of the insider article. I haven't done it in awhile so I'm gonna google it and post how to do it soon. But it's fairly easy, just an FYI
probably not but at the time Marc Gasol was emerging as a the top big man in Spain, along with 2 first round picks, and saved cap space for Memphis. now if you want to really point out a ridiculous trade, James Harden is all that needs to be said lol
This is actually looking at the trades with the power of foresight, which is the wrong way to grade trades because the reality is people can't see the future so you're judging the trade based on factors people have no way of knowing. Doing the LA trade nowadays would be like if Sacramento sent an expiring contract, 2 non-lottery picks and Seth Curry for Stephen Curry. Does that seem like a good trade to you? And please don't tell me MG was amazing, if LA and Memphis really thought he was good he wouldn't have slipped to the 48th pick just a year prior to being included in the trade. Lakers had Bynum, they could have traded him for Gasol instead and the Grizz could have obtained him a year earlier if they really thought he was the shizz. Chris Wallace who was the GM at the time turned out to be a protege of Jerry West who as we all know is a Laker lifer, not that hard to see a conflict of interest there. In fact a lot of team GMs were surprised by the trade because they didn't even know Gasol was on the block, Wallace didn't even bother phoning other teams and just made a deal directly with the Lakers so the trade is definitely not maximized, there weren't other teams who would raise the asking price for the Gasol. On the other hand Harden was an emerging 6th man, the package OKC got was actually top tier for what he was projecting as. Players don't go from 6th man to MVP runner up every year, it was a calculated risk for both teams and unfortunately for OKC and fortunately for Houston Harden wasn't just worth 15M, he turned out to be a franchise player. At the time though, a significant number of people thought he was at Parsons level, versatile offensive player with little D.
Right. ....although Memphis' staff was about the only team familiar with Marc Gasol because he was a high school basketball star there in the same town where his brother was an all star NBA player - and I'm sure Marc personally knew most of the staff there at the time hanging with his brother. I think it was a pretty short sided gamble that happened to work out and as has been mentioned earlier - the fact that an All Star could move teams and virtually no other team was contacted to try to maximize the offers shows this was a very ignorant deal by Memphis even if Marc ended up being good enough to justify the trade in the end.
The real irony here is that they are being praised for dumping Shaq late in his career(at 33) - a gamble that paid off because Shaq started to decline almost immediately YET they signed Kobe to an extension at a similar point in his career and almost immediately felt the sting of having a declining player hogging up most of their cap space. You gotta learn from more than just your failures....
Maybe 5, I seriously doubt 6, unless the Lakers picked up another marquee free agent or drafted someone who over-performed for their draft stock. It depends on how much younger that team got with Shaq still on the roster. For the sake of the argument, let's say the Lakers ended up with players who were to the quality of say Caron Butler and Lamar Odom, regardless. Throw in a few blue chip veterans. I honestly think they would've had enough to get past SA and/or Phoenix (Dallas). The Lakers were the real beast of West and the team you weren't likely going to beat. A motivated Shaq/Kobe (in his prime) alone would be enough to beat most of the best teams in the league. In the Suns' case, they barely beat a very weak Lakers team in 2005-06. If the Lakers retooled the team with younger players and maybe another all-star in a year or two. I think SA would be the team losing titles as a result. The Spurs never actually beat that team when they were at their best.
