How will the Russell Westbrook experiment end? Five possible futures for the Lakers and their former MVP

The Lakers really should have seen this coming. They should’ve known how little sense Russell Westbrook, perhaps the worst shooter in NBA history and among its least interested defenders, made on a roster built around LeBron James and Anthony Davis. But that much is obvious. No, what they really should’ve known was how little trade value Westbrook had around the league, regardless of his fit with James and Davis.

When the Houston Rockets shopped him in 2020, they found almost as dry a market as the Lakers did. Were it not for the nearly identical contract of the then-injured John Wall, Houston may not have been able to dump him at all. Most NBA teams have realized how limited Westbrook is. The Lakers were just the last suckers at the table, paying substantially more to land Westbrook than Washington had a year earlier only to find, to their surprise, that nobody wanted him seven months later. The only trade known to be on the table for Westbrook in the moments leading up to Thursday’s trade deadline was again for Wall. This time, however, the team trading Westbrook wouldn’t be getting the first-round pick. The Rockets wanted the Lakers to give them one, and a valuable one at that. All for a player who hasn’t appeared in a game this season.

That is how low Westbrook’s value has fallen. He’s less valuable than a player that doesn’t play. The Lakers opted against a deal for reasons that extended well beyond Wall. The uncertainty surrounding his value pales in comparison to the certainty of this roster’s mediocrity. The hole Westbrook helped the Lakers dig is too deep to climb out of in two months. The bone-thin roster his acquisition created isn’t worth trying to fix. Westbrook is still a Laker because sacrificing the future won’t fix their past mistake.

But with Westbrook still on the roster, that future feels murkier than ever. With the first obvious exit ramp now in the rearview mirror and hope for this season fading fast, it’s time to answer a very simple question: how and when is this Westbrook experiment actually going to end?

Scenario 1: It already has

The Lakers aren’t going to put Westbrook on ice in the way that the Rockets have with Wall. Doing so would fly in the face of everything the Buss family stands for as owners. This is an organization that caters to stars, occasionally to the detriment of the on-court product. Westbrook doesn’t have the organizational cache that, say, Kobe Bryant did when the Buss family gave him a $50 million early retirement present, but he’s not someone this organization is going to so aggressively alienate. He’s a local hero and former MVP. His number will never hang in the rafters, but the Lakers would probably prefer not to burn the bridge entirely. 

That does not mean that the Lakers are still going to treat Westbrook as their third star. The process of knocking him off of that pedestal began in a recent game against Indiana when Frank Vogel benched him for crunch time. He’s now done so on two more occasions. Westbrook has publicly pushed back on this approach, but another potentially important development came in Wednesday’s loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, which Westbrook missed. Talen Horton-Tucker scored 14 points on 5-of-8 shooting and dished out seven assists. Horton-Tucker averaged 23.3 points per game in his first three games this season, all of which James missed. He then went on to score 25 points combined in his next five after James returned. A trend is emerging here. When Horton-Tucker is offered real opportunities to handle the ball, he looks significantly better than when he’s relegated to off-ball duty.

Developing Horton-Tucker, as either a player or an asset, will be critical to whatever the Lakers plan to achieve next season. The same is true of Austin Reaves and potentially impending free agent Malik Monk. Kendrick Nunn will likely pick up his option and remain on the team next season, so getting him minutes late in the season will be critical. All told, if the organization’s priorities are shifting from this season to next season, removing Westbrook from the starting lineup and limiting his minutes would probably be in their best interest. In that sense, the Westbrook era might be coming to a close here and now even if he’s still on the roster as it’s happening. If the back injury that kept Westbrook out of Wednesday’s game persists, that process may have already begun.

One thing is for certain, though: the Lakers will not buy Westbrook out. That solution helps nobody. Westbrook would not want to give up money that he is contractually guaranteed. The Lakers can’t afford to have an enormous dead salary sitting on their books. That leads into what is probably the likeliest ending for the Westbrook era.

Scenario 2: The offseason pivot point

Two important things change on July 1, 2022. The first is that Westbrook, provided he takes the all but guaranteed step of picking up his $47 million player option, becomes an expiring contract. The second is that the NBA’s seven-year draft pick clock ticks forward by a year, allowing the Lakers to trade their 2029 first-round pick in addition to their 2027 selection. Throw in swap rights in a number of other distant seasons, and the Lakers suddenly have a pretty appealing overall trade package. Not only would Westbrook’s expiring salary make him fairly tradable under the right circumstances, but those picks could help net the Lakers a fairly substantial return.

The rumors are going to start the moment the Lakers are officially eliminated this season. You’re going to hear the biggest names first. Damian Lillard. Bradley Beal. James Harden if disaster strikes in Philadelphia. These names are not especially realistic unless the players in question explicitly demand to be traded to the Lakers and only the Lakers (and even then, Lillard is under contract for multiple seasons, so he likely lacks the leverage to make such an aggressive push). The Lakers would love another shot at a third star. Don’t expect them to get one. As high as their future first-round picks could be, the league tends to undervalue selections that won’t convey until the distant future. In all likelihood, they can’t win a bidding war for a superstar. 

Here’s a more realistic scenario. Some team has a pretty good player (or two) on a long-term deal. That team, for whatever reason, is not committed to that player (or players) and would prefer some cap flexibility and draft capital to take their team in another direction. Those are the sort of teams that might feasibly trade for Westbrook so long as they could get also grab a lottery ticket or two from the Lakers. Here are a few teams that could make some sense. 

• The Indiana Pacers signed Malcolm Brogdon to a two-year extension before the season but then traded for Tyrese Haliburton as his nominal replacement at point guard moving forward. They also added a player in Buddy Hield whom the Lakers have long coveted. If they want to emphasize Haliburton and Chris Duarte as their backcourt of the future, something surrounding Brogdon and Hield for Westbrook and draft picks could make sense. 
• The New York Knicks tried to move off of some of their veterans ahead of the deadline to clear minutes for youngsters like Cam Reddish, Immanuel Quickley, Obi Toppin and Quentin Grimes. They failed to do so. This offseason could give them a second chance. The easiest move here would be to consolidate their expiring contracts, Nerlens Noel, Alec Burks and Kemba Walker, into one bigger one in Westbrook. A more complicated construction? Say the Knicks were so unhappy with their long-term prospects that they decided on a true reset. Swapping Julius Randle and Evan Fournier for Westbrook and picks would save the Knicks a total of $103 million in salary between the 2023-24 and 2025-26 seasons. They would essentially be planning a total reset after Westbrook’s contract expires, and in the process, grabbing exactly the sort of high-upside future pick they used to trade away frequently.
• Dallas traded Kristaps Porzingis explicitly to save money. Perhaps it wouldn’t mind getting off of some of the long-term money owed to role players like Reggie Bullock and Tim Hardaway Jr.

These teams might be interested in keeping Westbrook on their roster and they might not. For the purposes of a trade, he can function as an enormous giant salary or as a player another team might actually want to use. It doesn’t particularly matter which. Either is significantly more tradable than Westbrook was before Thursday’s deadline with another year remaining on his contract. That doesn’t make this sort of Westbrook trade easy, but it’s still the likeliest outcome on the board and probably the preferable one. This is a clean break that would give the Lakers a chance to build something better next season. Our next scenario is much bleaker. 

Scenario 3: The never-ending nightmare

The Lakers have a $156 million payroll. Their luxury tax bill takes the total to almost $200 million, a threshold it could pass with a buyout addition or two. This is the second consecutive season in which the Lakers will pay the luxury tax. Next season’s roster is already roughly $2 million above the projected tax line with just seven players signed to the roster. The Lakers are a cash cow in terms of revenue. They rake in an estimated $150 million annually in local television money alone. But they do not have an ownership group that is flush with cash. Just ask Alex Caruso.

The Lakers tend to be fairly willing to pay the tax when they think they have a chance to win the championship. Last year’s team, due to a variety of circumstances both in and out of their control, lost in the first round. This year’s team might not get that far. If ownership is unwilling to shell out tax dollars for the third season in a row with no guarantee of championship contention, there is a way they could potentially get below the line at a terrible on-court cost.

Remember that $47 million player option Westbrook has? If the Lakers are desperate enough to get below the tax line, they could convince Westbrook to opt out of it and instead sign a long-term extension for more overall dollars. This, in essence, is what the Phoenix Suns did with Chris Paul last offseason, though they did so for very different reasons. Say the Lakers offered Westbrook $60 million over three years. That’s $13 million that the free-agent market almost certainly wouldn’t give him, and it could push the Lakers so far below the line that even filling out the roster on top of it wouldn’t make them taxpayers (provided they didn’t splurge on other players). The front office could potentially spin it as a basketball move, opening up the flexibility to potentially use the non-taxpayer mid-level exception or absorb more money in trades, but even if the Lakers did ultimately end up paying the tax, this would be a financially-driven move.

Westbrook is already 33. Odds are, he’s only going to decline further from here. So long as James and Davis are on the roster, the Lakers have no path to actual cap space. Even if they did, this barren free-agent class doesn’t have targets worth chasing. Aside from perhaps clearing enough room to retain Malik Monk with the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, there really isn’t a justifiable basketball rationale for doing this. But there was no justifiable basketball rationale for letting Caruso walk either, and well, look what happened. This isn’t particularly likely, but it’s a worst-case scenario to watch out for. Our next possibility feels downright optimistic by comparison.

Scenario 4: Let nature take its course

The Lakers have already squandered one year of what’s left of LeBron’s prime. Would they really punt away another one? Well… maybe. As it stands right now, the only player on the Lakers roster with a guaranteed contract for the 2023-24 season is Anthony Davis. Even with a Talen Horton-Tucker player option on the books, the Lakers are staring max cap space in the face. 

As of right now, the 2023 free-agent class looks pretty promising. Nikola Jokic is going to sign an extension with the Nuggets, and Khris Middleton is probably staying in Milwaukee, but once you dip below the perennial All-Stars, the class looks pretty interesting. Andrew Wiggins, D’Angelo Russell, Fred VanVleet, Jerami Grant, Myles Turner, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Caris LeVert, Christian Wood, Dillon Brooks and Kyle Kuzma all have the capacity to become unrestricted free agents. Some of them will sign extensions. Some will hit the open market. At that point, the Lakers will have a genuine opportunity to revamp the supporting cast around Davis… provided they haven’t either extended Westbrook or traded him for long-term money.

Declining both opportunities would force the Lakers and Westbrook through another awkward year together next season. It would also raise questions about James’ future, and should he sign an extension this offseason, much of that 2023 cap space evaporates. If the Lakers want to truly remodel their team with cap space, there are easier ways to do it. They could try to convince James to take a pay cut in the name of winning (something he hasn’t done since 2011). They could also give him a one-year extension and set him up for free agency in 2024. That would not only clear him off of the books in time for the possible availability of Devin Booker, Jaylen Brown, Karl-Anthony Towns, Pascal Siakam, Domantas Sabonis and DeJounte Murray, but it would also allow James the freedom to choose his next team in the first offseason in which his son Bronny could theoretically become draft-eligible.

Inertia is a powerful force in sports. It’s easier to do nothing than it is to do something. Maybe the Lakers talk themselves into a year of accumulated chemistry righting this ship. Maybe they believe a healthier version of this roster can compete. The Lakers probably shouldn’t bring Westbrook back next season, but the idea that they might just let his contract play out until its natural end shouldn’t be dismissed. With that covered, only the scenario the Lakers intended to play out remains. 

Scenario 5: The miraculous turnaround

Let’s imagine that everything breaks right for the Lakers. Westbrook, grateful to have made it beyond the trade deadline, starts trying harder on defense. He trades in most of his mid-range jumpers for corner 3-pointers and layups. He gets comfortable with the idea that he shouldn’t always be on the floor for crunch time. The Lakers, buoyed by these improvements, some injury luck and an addition or two on the buyout market, make some real noise in the playoffs. 

Well, in that unlikely scenario, the Lakers could offer Westbrook an extension on top of his $47 million player option. All told, he would be eligible for something like $270 million for the next five seasons, same as James Harden. More likely, this sort of extension would look like the one Paul signed in Phoenix. He’d get guaranteed more money over a few years, but lower his immediate cap figure and face the specter of a partial guarantee or two on the back end of the contract.

Yet in an article in which the idea of Westbrook getting benched or traded for the fourth time is seriously broached, this feels like the least likely outcome. Nothing that has happened this season suggests a happy ending for this partnership. It’s not a matter of “if” the Lakers are going to move away from Westbrook. It’s when.