Lakers Rumors: Why they’re not ready to move Lonzo Ball
By Keith Rivas
They’ve made signing a superstar more important than making one
All of the drama that’s come out of drafting Lonzo Ball makes it easy to see that there’s way more room for harm than there is for anything good to come of the selection. If Magic Johnson and company really wanted to give a positive change to the organization, they would focus as hard as they possibly can on grooming Lonzo Ball into the next superstar.
Unfortunately, the focus has been on just the opposite.
The majority of the conversations that the front office is actually seeming to have is what their free agency options are for the next two summers instead of trying to get the most out of Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, and Kyle Kuzma before a star actually joins them.
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Kuzma has shown flashes of how great he can really be and the steal that he was as a late first round pick. Meanwhile, Ingram has shown growth in his sophomore season with plenty of more areas to improve on to be at his peak potential.
The Lakers have allowed the conversation about Lonzo Ball to be exhaustively about how he makes others around him better on the court without addressing the concerns about his play and mentality within his personal game that he brings to the table.
Not only is this going to stunt the growth of Ball as a player past this season, but it’s only going to hurt their free agency chances with anybody, let alone the bigger names and established stars. To make matters worse, the Isaiah Thomas situation they’re now tied down to for the rest of this regular season opens up another potential can of worms that they really don’t want to have opened.
Should the chemistry become an issue because of Isaiah Thomas, the handling of the situation with the Ball family will only become more awkward to deal with in any manner.
The best part of this point? Paul George and LeBron James probably aren’t coming to Los Angeles anyway — so they’ve managed to really dig themselves in a hole if Lonzo Ball decides to bounce.