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 .

Excitement for Lakers Future Acquisition

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 .