Lakers dipped their toe into the trade market with Dorian Finney-Smith, but will they dive all the way in?

The Los Angeles Lakers rarely make incremental improvements. Hollywood's team thinks in terms of blockbusters. There's a reason every superstar that hits the trade market is at least tangentially linked to them, no matter how little sense such a move would make. The Lakers rarely go more than a few years without a mega star on the roster. They frequently have two or three. Big names tend to want to play for them due to a combination of their market and their history, and the result has been a front office so fixated on those mega moves that they tend to ignore the smaller ones that are just as important to contending.

It's one of the great ironies of the LeBron James-Anthony Davis era for the Lakers. They won their 2020 championship precisely because a superstar — Kawhi Leonard — spurned them. That allowed them to fill out the roster with the 3-and-D wings that supported James and Davis so ably in the Orlando bubble, but practically the moment the championship sheen wore off, the Lakers turned back into the Lakers, and the star hunt began anew. Danny Green and a first-round pick were shipped out for Dennis Schroder. Kyle Kuzma, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and another pick landed Russell Westbrook, and when the Westbrook deal failed, the Lakers spent another first-round pick to effectively turn him into another former All-Star ball-handler, D'Angelo Russell.

The approach was misguided on a number of levels that have made themselves evident, but for our purposes, the important one was that the Lakers treated stars and role players as an either/or proposition. They were all in on wings until they were all in on ball-handling. The 2021 offseason exemplified that. Even after the Westbrook trade, the Lakers devoted the remainder of their financial flexibility to not one, but two ball-handlers in Talen Horton-Tucker and Kendrick Nunn, but let ace wing defender Alex Caruso walk for nothing. They never embraced the reality that these two archetypes can and really must work in tandem.

That's what makes the Dorian Finney-Smith trade so refreshing. Finally, the Lakers get it. In Finney-Smith, they've landed a wing who figures to amplify every significant Laker in some meaningful way. James now has a 43.5% 3-point shooter to help space the floor in a season in which his rim numbers are beginning to decline. Davis has spent the entire season putting out the fires his guards have started on defense. With a bit more point-of-attack defense in front of him, his rim-protection becomes far more powerful. Even Austin Reaves benefits by omission. With Russell gone, the role of secondary shot-creator is officially his. Considering the fact that he's averaged more than 20 points and seven assists since Max Christie joined the starting lineup, another 3-and-D wing should do wonders for him as well. The Lakers didn't need to go out and add star power to increase the overall star power on the roster. They've made their best players better by adding a player who makes their lives easier.

While far from perfect, the whole roster makes sense now. The core roles are all filled. James and Reaves handle the ball. Finney-Smith and Christie defend it. Gabe Vincent does a bit of both. All of them shoot 3s. So do Dalton Knecht and Rui Hachimura, who also adds needed rebounding and size. Davis does everything you could reasonably ask a center to do. There is balance. Balance is healthy.

And in this case, balance was cheap. The Lakers snuck Finney-Smith off of the Nets for three second-round picks. There's an argument here suggesting that the limited price reflects Finney-Smith's true value. Count me a skeptic. Finney-Smith's defense didn't look as good in Brooklyn as it did in Dallas, but he wasn't playing for anything. He'll have better creators setting him up now. He's never had a rim-protector like Davis behind him. He's not, say, OG Anunoby. But he's a good player who makes sense for the role he's inheriting, and in the grand scheme of things, the Lakers got him for a song.

Their two juicy tradable first-round picks in 2029 and 2031 are still intact. So is the protected portion of the 2027 pick they owe Utah (essentially, this means the Lakers can trade the rights to the pick provisionally on the condition that it lands between No. 1 and No. 4, with Utah receiving it if it doesn't). Swap rights in 2026, 2028 and 2030 are also on the table. The real bullets are still sitting in the chamber to be used however the Lakers see fit.

That doesn't mean the Lakers should rush into another trade. The lesson here is in the benefits of flexibility. For now, the obvious decision would be to hold all of those future assets. James is 40, after all, and maintaining optionality for after he's gone is critical if they are going to avoid another half-decade swoon like the one LeBron pulled them out of in 2018. But the addition of Finney-Smith opens doors. The roster is viable if not quite contender-quality now. They can fairly evaluate what they have now that everyone is in their proper roles. As they showed in 2023, the Lakers are perfectly content to make the roster prove it deserves a significant investment at the trade deadline. Maybe it doesn't. Even if it does, that could mean any number of things.

There are other cheap yet meaningful upgrades on the table. We've been hearing about Jonas Valanciunas for months now. The Lakers badly need a true center. In a perfect world, he could play some minutes alongside Davis just to cut down on his wear and tear, but more than anything, it's just time for the Christian Koloko experience to come to an organic end. You'll hear names like Nick Richards and Robert Williams III for the same reasons. The idea here will be to use Vincent as the matching salary, either because Shake Milton will prove serviceable as a tertiary ball-handler or Reaves will play so well one won't be necessary.

The 3-and-D market tends to be pricey. Perhaps they could seek someone a bit more one-dimensional, a Simone Fontecchio or Luke Kennard, for example, but at this price point, they're probably better off considering an upgrade on Vincent in the backcourt. If the Golden State Warriors eventually flip Dennis Schroder, his experience with this group has value. Jevon Carter does the same basic things Vincent does at half of the salary, if the Bulls are open to any sort of swap. Perhaps there's a universe in which the Lakers use Vincent to get a center and then turn around and use Jalen Hood-Schifino's contract to replace Vincent with a cheaper guard like Carter. These aren't game-changers, but they're incremental upgrades that the Lakers could look at if they aren't ready to jump into the deep end.

But these are, of course, the Lakers, and we have to acknowledge the reality that they're always gearing up for possible big-game hunts. If there's a star on the board, the Lakers will at least weigh a possible run. The Finney-Smith deal helps on that front in two ways. The obvious is that he fits on star-heavy rosters because he does the things stars tend not to do. The subtler: acquiring him saved the Lakers around $3.5 million. That might not seem like much, but it's enormous for salary-matching purposes in the second apron era. Remember, if the Lakers make a big trade, it's almost certainly going to be unbalanced from a roster standpoint. They'd need to combine three or four salaries to get one big one, and that means they'd need leftover money to sign free agents to fill out the rest of the roster. The question here is which big names the Lakers could reasonably target.

Get one name out of your head for now: De'Aaron Fox. Even if the Kings put him on the block, which they probably aren't ready to do, that's just not a bidding war the Lakers can win with two first-round picks. The Rockets and Spurs simply have too much to trade. Stars like that just aren't on the table for the Lakers. They're not getting someone young, healthy and easygoing. If they're getting a star, it's going to be someone flawed. Someone old or with a health or contract issue driving their availability. Those are the kind of stars realistically in their price range, should they choose to pursue them.

I still wouldn't bet on the Lakers getting into the Jimmy Butler sweepstakes, should those start back up. A star trade has to fill two purposes for the Lakers. Obviously, it has to make the current team better, but it also has to serve them after James is gone. There are no do-overs on trades of that magnitude. If the Lakers are going to take post-LeBron tanking off of the board, they have to feel reasonably confident in their ability to remain competitive without him. Butler, at 35, is too old for that to be the case.

Zach LaVine is a bit more plausible, though the salary matching is difficult. A four-man package of Vincent, Hachimura, Hood-Schifino and Jarred Vanderbilt gets the Lakers $437,000 short of the target, which they'd need to clear to avoid a first-apron hard cap. That's doable by swapping someone like Christian Wood for a cheaper minimum salary, but the Bulls would still need to clear three roster spots to make this work. They can make that work if the draft incentive is great enough, but it's no easy task. The bigger question is LaVine's possible fit in Los Angeles.

It's probably better for post-LeBron life than the current Laker reality. The Lakers are going to need a better primary ball-handler than Reaves by then, and LaVine's scoring meshes quite nicely with a Davis-led defense. Going into the 2025 playoffs, though, the Lakers would be betting quite a bit on a LaVine-Reaves backcourt that comes with major defensive question marks. They'd have to count on out-scoring opponents while Davis and Finney-Smith help the Lakers play something like average defense. All of that is a stretch. We can't take it off of the table, though, just because of the setup for life after LeBron. If LaVine stays healthy (another huge if!) he could be a solid bridge star to serve alongside Davis as the Lakers sort out their future.

Two other names to watch here come from the same team. The Pelicans are trading someone purely for luxury tax purposes. Would it be worth sniffing around either a Brandon Ingram reunion or a Zion Williamson redemption tour? Both are cheaper than LaVine purely by virtue of age and contract cycles. They are on their second contracts, at least for now, so matching money for either in the $36 million range is easier than LaVine at more than $43 million.

The Lakers love homecomings. They've brought back Schroder, Russell, Dwight Howard, Rajon Rondo and Avery Bradley for second go-rounds in recent years. The best version of Ingram would create serious matchup problems for Laker opponents. Just think of how big lineups featuring James, Davis, Ingram and Finney-Smith would be. Ingram has never been a consistent defender, though he's shown flashes, and that much length would cause problems. His 3-point volume waxes and wanes. Maybe JJ Redick could stabilize it. He's an underrated playmaker when he wants to be, and he's an easier long-term fit with Reaves than LaVine would be. The Pelicans have spent months failing to trade Ingram because of how scared other teams are of paying his next contract. It's slightly more palatable for the Lakers because they know James is coming off of their books sooner rather than later. He's gettable at a reasonable price.

Is Williamson? It's impossible to know. You could argue his injury history is so extreme that he's a negative-value asset. You could also argue that you should never, under any circumstances, trade a player with MVP-upside. Williamson has that. The Lakers tend to believe in their own ability to rehabilitate flawed talents. They traded for Westbrook after all. A James-Davis-Williamson trio is certainly suboptimal from a spacing perspective, but the Lakers won a championship playing non-shooting centers with those two in 2020. Just imagine the rim pressure those three could put on opponents. When James retires, the Lakers could recalibrate their roster fully around Williamson and Davis with more shooting in mind. No other player we've mentioned here could ever realistically be the face of the Lakers. Williamson could be. That's the sort of thing that tends to tempt them.

Maybe there's a middle ground here, something closer to the 2023 deadline during which the Lakers used one first-round pick for multiple higher-end supporting pieces. The Collin Sexton-Walker Kessler combination out of Utah makes some sense, addressing spare ball-handling and center in one fell swoop, and with 3-and-D wing already added, the Lakers would have filled all of their obvious holes before the deadline. Both fit. Both have room to grow on better rosters. Negotiating with Danny Ainge tends to be a nightmare. One unprotected first for the pair could make sense. Two is an overpay. Maybe the middle ground would be one, plus removing the protections on that 2027 pick?

Don't rule out a return to the Brooklyn well for Cam Johnson, either. Brooklyn is reportedly seeking multiple first-round picks for him. An unprotected Lakers pick from the post-James era might be enough to make them blink. Remember, they were offered a heavily protected first-round pick for Finney-Smith and turned it down in favor of second-rounders from the Lakers. They are thoughtful about pick quality as well as quantity. They'd probably rather have one good pick than two bad ones.

Johnson is setting career-highs in basically everything this season. Is that a Brooklyn mirage, like Mikal Bridges' brief star-turn in 2023? It feels closer to real. This isn't a usage spike. He's just doing everything he already did at a higher level. He is still primarily an off-ball player, but an elite one who has mastered the art of getting open and shooting over smaller defenders. The Lakers sought such a player in Klay Thompson over the summer. Johnson is younger and a better defender at this point. They obviously see the appeal. This is another "split the assets across multiple deals" option. Maybe one pick, or one pick and a swap, lands Johnson, and then the Lakers can use the other for Kessler.

The next month is going to be crucial here. It's the first fair period of self-evaluation the Lakers will have. In February they will know not only what they need, but what is worth paying to get it. That wasn't possible before Finney-Smith. His arrival sets the Lakers up for practically any kind of trade deadline they might want to have. If they do nothing else, they've fulfilled their unspoken obligation to James to improve. He has a competitive team now. If they seek more role players, they'll put the stars they have in a better position to succeed. And if they do seek out another big name? They now have at least one new piece that could feasibly support him. They still have a ways to go if they hope to seriously contend, but for the first time this season, that window feels at least cracked. It's up to them to find out whether or not they can shove it open.