Trade & FA 2023-24: Stein-Ingram Trade Inevitable| LAL Want Lebron Back On Any Terms

[Jason Terry]

To add to your point: by having Kyrie as our second best and most important player our window can close any time for that season because of his injury history. So putting all our chips on the table for one year is a very risky bet und could backfire like it did for the Clippers the last few years. That‘s also true for this season by the way, let’s hope he stays healthy for the next weeks. Would I bet my own money on it? Never.

Important point you make. While we are in the Luka-Kyrie Era it doesn’t make sense to go all in on any single year because of the injury factor. 

Looking long term we are opening potentially the longest championship window in recent memory if Luka continues his trajectory. 8 years? 10 years? The level of patience we have will be determined by how early in the window we win a championship. If it’s early like Jokic we can be patient and smart. If it’s later like Dirk we could see some desperation

The Luka-Kyrie window looks to be 3 years right now. This year and the next 2. The entire core of this team (minus DJJ and Exum at the moment)  is locked up for this time period. At the end of it Kyrie will be 34. PJ and Gafford will be free agents. Lively and Omax will be heading into their last season of their rookie deals. Luka will have one final year of a lower max before his number goes way up. 

I think Lively and PJ will be priorities. My prediction is Gafford will be the guy that doesn’t get paid. Gafford just fired his agent and is with Klutch so he’s likely to be overpaid on his next deal and will be too much of a luxury by summer of 26

Best option for the next Luka team after this would be to add a superstar in FA in the summer of 26 when we have max cap room. We could add sammy superstar, re-sign PJ with bird rights at a bigger number, re-sign Kyrie at a lower number, let Gafford walk and give Lively and Omax rookie scale extensions. This would put us way over the cap, but would not cost us any assets