Lakers' Jaw-Dropping Move: LUKA DONCIC IS A LAKER, Why Lebron Is FURIOUS!

The recent trade between the Lakers and Mavericks has shifted the landscape of the NBA, with Anthony Davis heading to Dallas and Luka Doncic becoming a Laker. As a lifelong Lakers fan, I’m filled with hope for this new chapter, reflecting on the impacts of this deal on LeBron, the franchise's culture, and the futures of both players. 

• The shock of the trade details and emotional reactions 
• Analyzing the value of the trade for both teams 
• The Lakers rediscovering their franchise identity 
• Luka's potential impact on LeBron and the team 
• Anticipating the next steps for Anthony Davis in Dallas 
• Reflection on being a Lakers fan throughout iconic history 
• The significance of moving away from a singular star dynamic

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Transcript

Shocking Lakers-Mavericks Trade Analysis

Speaker 1 0:00

All right, guys, thank you so much and welcome. And this is the Stephan Piscano podcast. With Stephan Piscano and I'm a little bit flabbergasted, guys. This is an emergency sports podcast.

Speaker 1 0:12

First time I've ever done one of these, but I had to because it's almost 11 pm at night here on the West Coast, I just got a text from my brother in DC there on the East Coast and he said the Lakers just traded Anthony Davis for Luka Doncic and my first reaction was yeah, okay, that's, that's BS. There's no way that they did that because the Lakers don't have enough assets, they don't have enough draft picks. Because, being a diehard sports fan that I am and being a of my life, a Lakers fan, until LeBron hijacked my team, the last seven years we only had two available first round picks that we could trade Might be 29 and 31. We traded one to Utah and I've got to look up the specifics because I'm doing instant reaction here. Just right after that, I realized just in the last 20 minutes here that the trade is confirmed, so let me look it up right now. Okay, so here's the details of the trade Markeith Morris, the Mavericks get Anthony Davis, max Christie and a 2029 Lakers first round pick, which appears to be, at this time, unprotected. The Jazz get Jalen Hood-Shafino, the 2025 Clippers second round pick and a 2025 Mavericks second round pick. So I am shocked, guys. The biggest thing that's shocking about this to me isn't so much the names involved, but I'm just shocked. The Mavs only got one first-round pick.

Speaker 1 1:49

You would think that Luka, being an all-NBA first-team player five consecutive years and only 25 years old, still having two years left on his deal before he's a free agent, and when you factor in him going to a premier historic destination like the Lakers, that has a great shot at resigning him for the long term and having, before going to the Lakers and LeBron James relegating him to a sidekick role where his value dropped. Davis was widely considered for four or five years prior to joining the Lakers as a top three, top five player in the NBA and he's played like it. This year, the MVP odds were high on him the first half of this season, when the Lakers were playing well, davis was really the cause of that and he's got great on-off numbers. So I get it from a value standpoint for him as a player and the Mavs want to win now, but I still think the Mavericks could have extracted at least the two first-round unprotected picks the Lakers had available earlier to send. Just because when you look at what Kevin Durant got a couple years ago, you look at the value placed on players of this caliber where Luke is at in his age and his consistency even though he's injured right now and he's had a little bit of injury history he's been fairly consistent from an availability standpoint and certainly from the caliber of player that he is. You're usually going to see four or five first round picks unprotected going for a player like that. So I guess that puts the value that the Mavs are putting on the ability to win now with Anthony Davis if he stays healthy at two or three, maybe four first round picks in itself to contrast the value for Luca. But I'm excited guys.

Speaker 1 3:45

So I'm from Alabama originally, but Alabama has no pro basketball team and no pro football team. So as a kid, the first basketball game that I ever remember watching, I got to watch Magic Johnson play and I just immediately thought he was about the coolest guy I'd ever seen. And so somehow as a kid in Alabama I became a diehard Lakers fan. And then I was a diehard and still am a diehard Kobe Bryant fan for 20 years. I got to attend. You know, obviously, years later, as an adult moving to California, it made a little bit more sense. I got to attend several Lakers games, including Kobe's last game, and it's been extremely depressing for me as a Kobe fan and a Laker fan, watching what LeBron has done to my team, you know, not only with shifting all of the narratives to where, instead of, it went watching it in the eighties and the nineties, and the two thousands with Kobe and magic and everybody else. It was always what can the player do for the team? Can Michael Jordan win a championship for the Bulls? Can Kobe win one for the Lakers? And with the Lakers we have such a historic history, we're such an incredible history. It wasn't just can you win one, it's can you win more than Magic? I remember gosh in the mid-'90s, late-'90s, kobe going on Magic Johnson's brief talk show that he had I think it was called the Magic Hour and Kobe saying to Magic well, you got five, how many am I supposed to get? Six, seven, eight? And you know, kobe obviously ended up winning five for us.

Speaker 1 5:16

When LeBron joined the team, that narrative changed to what can the Lakers do for LeBron? What can we do for him? Let's trade away and then every single season that he's been there, going on seven years now every single year, go look it up, not just with the Lakers, but LeBron's entire career, really at least the last 18 to 20 years. Here it's. What can we do for him? Trade away the assets, trade away the draft picks, get him more help, get him more help, get him more help.

Speaker 1 5:41

And the reason this is such a beautiful thing to me is it kind of makes me feel like I don't know I might be back in the fold here as a Lakers fan, because not that I'm such a diehard Luka guy. Luka actually plays a style that I don't really enjoy watching. It's almost identical to LeBron to where the ball has to flow through him. He has to have the high usage rate, everything's about him, which is the same as it's always been for LeBron. You kind of have to cater to him in a sense. But that's why I love it, because now, as somebody that's not the biggest LeBron James fan, to put it lightly now this is probably the one and only player in the NBA that has the combination of the game that's almost identical to LeBron.

Speaker 1 6:27

You know a lot of people. What we do which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it is we only compare white players to historic white players and black players to historic black players. But honestly, go look at the stats and watch the game and how they play and really look at it, even down to the mannerisms. Just like how everybody said and I agree that Kobe Bryant's game was almost a carbon copy of Michael Jordan's game. Luka's game is almost a carbon copy of LeBron's. Obviously LeBron's more athletic, but they're those big forwards they have to carry the ball. They're a point forward and they really need that high usage to be successful.

Speaker 1 7:04

So this is going to be really fun to watch for me as somebody that doesn't really care for LeBron and as somebody that has been a Lakers fan for the majority of the last 35 years. For me to get to watch the one player that LeBron has to defer to definitively, without a shadow of a doubt and there's no whining that can be done to the media, there's nothing he can do about it to say that that's not the right thing, because you've got what has been definitively the greatest scorer in the game the last five, six years here, joining not even in his prime 25, 26 years old, about to enter the prime years of his career. This is a beautiful thing and also, on a side note, I'm really excited as somebody that believes Anthony Davis has been held back by playing with LeBron the last five, six, seven years here. I'm really excited to get to see what he does with the Mavericks that have a win-now team. They were in the NBA Finals last year. Davis again has put up incredible stats both on the defensive side and the offensive side of the ball this year, pairing him now with Kyrie Irving, lebron's old teammate, and a lot of people.

Speaker 1 8:15

This is obvious too, but some of you that don't might forget that in 2017, kyrie Irving demanded a trade from the Cavs and from LeBron, and the reason it was reported at that time he wanted out was because he was tired of playing in the style that LeBron forced him to play, with the stat padding and focusing more on LeBron's stats than on the ultimate team outcome. That was reported as one of the big reasons Kyrie Irving wanted to be traded away from LeBron's team in 2017. He's had a wild road since then. Maybe things are different now for him and he sees his perspective a little bit, but it's going to be fun to watch two LeBron James cast-off sidekicks get to play together, still at the tail end of their prime, and see what they can do. I really hope Davis stays healthy so that we can get to see what that outcome will be, because I think that the Mavericks could be a sleeper finals team right here, right now, if Davis and Kyrie both stay healthy, with what they've got, and then that 2029 first round Lakers pick.

Speaker 1 9:19

Again, I'm shocked that's the most shocking thing to me that the Mavs only got one pick, but there's still some value there. A lot of the reason that people put value on it was because they thought that, well, davis might be retired by then. Lebron definitely will be retired by then. That's going to be a high pick. Now, though, with you trading Luka at 25, 26 years old, you have to assume that that's going to be a less valuable pick. So I think the Mavs got hosed on the draft pick side of things in this deal, but again, maybe they don't care, maybe it's just about we didn't think we were going to be able to resign luca in a couple of years. We want to win now, and we think davis gives us a great chance to do that and let's get as much value get an all-star, mvp level, caliber player while we can, and just move on.

Speaker 1 10:04

And again, for me, as a as a former and maybe back again, current diehard lakers fan, this is exciting for the future, guys, because with all of LeBron's whining, with all of the help and go back and look at it they've made a pretty significant move either every offseason or every trade deadline in the seven years that he's been there and it's been for his benefit. Okay, you want us to go get AD and trade away five draft picks and all of our good young players? Fine, we'll do it. You want us to go get Russell Westbrook? Ok, fine, we'll do it. Oh, now you want us to trade Russell Westbrook and our draft picks and get you more high caliber, all star caliber players to back you up as role players? Ok, we'll do that. They did all of this. Now, once again, here we are at 40 years old and he's demanding more help. Well, okay, now you're the help. Now you're the help you get to back up this guy who some people think is the best player in the league right here, right now.

Speaker 1 11:01

Because you know what else, guys, a lot of people think, oh man, well, why I've heard this by so many people on ESPN and so many talk show hosts that are big name people in sports say, oh my gosh. Well, what are you going to do? Are you not going to help LeBron? And then you end up being a play-in team or you miss the playoffs because he didn't go all in. Well, guess what guys? We've been a play-in team, six out of the, or worse, because there was a couple of years where we missed the play-in entirely, at least one. Again, I'm doing this off the top of my head because I just got this in 20 minutes ago but we've been in the playing game or worse, five out of the six, and this year it might be six of seven. It was going to be six of seven, I believe, and until this trade we'll see how luca does and when he gets back, because he's injured right now but we've been in the playing or worse, five out of the six seasons that lebron's been there.

Speaker 1 11:50

That means that, with all this, with this guy who is falsely propped up as an all-time top three, top five player some people I mean I'm not going to entertain what some people say, but as a falsely propped up ahead of greats like Kobe Bryant, like Tim Duncan, who owned him in the finals finals every time they faced, really, because the one time that they didn't defeat LeBron in the finals was when Ray Allen hit that bizarre miracle shot. That was just wild and LeBron was airballing threes down the stretch. We'll talk about that later. But with all of that, with this guy, with a former before he came to play with LeBron, universally regarded top five player in Davis, as what should have been the lead dog, as his quote-unquote sidekick, with going all-in for the Westbrooks which you see how great he's playing now with Jokic, and you saw him average a triple-double the season before joining the Lakers, and then he got just destroyed by playing with LeBron, as so many have.

Speaker 1 12:52

With all of that, guess what your end result was? You were a playing team, or you were missing the play-in or you were missing the playoffs. Every season, with the exception of the weirdest season in sports history where the entire infrastructure was shut down for a global pandemic, other than that where you got a weird almost six months off in the middle of the season right before the playoffs. Then you gear up for this weird bubble championship which, hey, you know that's great. Other than that, every single season they've been a play-in team or worse, by sucking up to LeBron James, by catering to LeBron James and by throwing away the future of the franchise for LeBron James.

Speaker 1 13:32

And so I'm ecstatic as a Lakers fan. I think I'm back, I think I'm going to say I'm back, let's go, lakers. We get to actually make a move for the future for once, and they did it in such a beautiful way. Way to go. Rob Palenka, you hosed the Mavs, in my opinion, by only giving up one first round pick and you get the one guy. That's not only for the future, it's for right now. And you can say to LeBron aren't you happy? We got you, we got you help and LeBron can finally take a backseat and let me get my team back. So it's exciting day to be a Lakers fan. I had to hop on.