With no apparent traction on a Kyrie Irving deal, ESPN’s longtime NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski says he sees Houston Rockets veteran Eric Gordon as a potential trade target for the Los Angeles Lakers.
The rebuilding Rockets have made it clear that Gordon is available for the right price — reportedly, a future first-round draft asset that isn’t likely to be too late in the order. At this point, it seems to be a simple matter of whether another team chooses to meet that valuation. If not, Houston general manager Rafael Stone is comfortable bringing Gordon back for another season as a veteran mentor to Houston’s young core.
So, as the 2022 NBA offseason enters its slow period after the first wave of free agency, is there a team that might still be aggressive enough to make such a move? On Monday’s Get Up television show, Woj said:
I think the Lakers will make a deal, maybe more than one deal.
It may not be for Kyrie Irving, it may not be for an All-NBA player, an All-Star… players like Eric Gordon in Houston, Buddy Hield in Indiana, Patrick Beverley, who came to the Jazz in a trade from Minnesota… who are role players on winning teams.
What is the price for those kinds of moves? They’re going to continue to be active on those things.
The challenge for the Lakers, who are well above the NBA’s salary cap at the moment, is the league’s salary matching rules for trades. To absorb Gordon’s salary of $19.6 million, the Lakers would almost certainly need to send out Talen Horton-Tucker and his $10.3 million salary. But from Houston’s side, the Rockets aren’t likely to be interested in cutting into their projected salary cap room in the 2023 offseason for Horton-Tucker, who has a player option worth over $11 million for 2023-24.
Thus, any deal would likely require a third team willing to take Horton-Tucker, along with either the Lakers or that third team (or a combination) being willing to send some sort of draft asset package to the Rockets that would incentivize Stone enough to make the move.
That’s a lot of dominoes that need to line up perfectly, which inherently makes a deal less likely than likely. Yet, with a 37-year-old LeBron James entering the final year of his Lakers contract, that may provide Los Angeles with extra incentive to push their (trade) chips to the table.
Stay tuned!
