Game goal is for the

game is 4-3 in the win

2020 NBA championship belongs to the Los Angeles

Lakers

Hello me, copy, copy, love me, love me, zombie, welcome in Trevor Lane here for

Lakersnation.com, you're home for everything. Lakers. We're going to do an ideal off season. That's right, another edition of the ideal off season where we take a simple concept that the Lakers are constructing a team around and then we build it out and we see what it would look like if the Lakers go that route. So we've already done in previous episodes. we've done, what if the Lakers were willing to trade everything, future draft picks, cap space, whatever it takes in order to win right now? What might that roster look like? What would it look like if the Lakers decided, you know what? That's it. We're not trading Russell Westbrook. We're keeping him. I built out that roster last time. Today, what I'm going to do is what if the Lakers

spent their taxpayer mid-level exception, which is the most money that they've got to spend in

free agency on a center? Then what does the roster build look like? And I think this is really important

because the market is so thin at the wing. And let me tell you, just to peek behind the curtain,

I went into this roster build. And by the way, I love doing this. I love putting the pieces

of the puzzle together. But I went into this thinking I was going to keep Russell Westbrook on

the roster. I was not going to trade him since that's kind of how it feels the wind is going to

blow here. But I did not. I wound up trading him because I found it so impossible to put together a

team that would actually work and could function because the free agent market, particularly on the

wings, is so, so thin.

If I commit to paying a center that $6 million that the Lakers have to pay,

I didn't have that money to spend on the wings and the Lakers just invariably wound up

so thin there, no matter what I tried, I couldn't see anything that was grounded in reality

that would really work.

And by the way, I should mention that too.

The way I approach this is I try to look at each roster build as though it's

something that could really happen.

...