Despite moving the biggest, most amazing and frankly transformative trade of a generation at the 2025 NBA Trade Deadline, the LA Lakers still are not back in title contention.
The arrival of Luka Doncic reopened a theoretical competitive window, paired the Slovenian bohemian with the eternal LeBron James and the effervescent Austin Reaves to create a dynamic offensive trio that will only get better together with a full season of chemistry. But with the defensive personnel lacking and a roster not built around Doncic – simply because they never knew they were going to have him – they are not there yet, as evidenced by their defeat in five games in the first round of the playoffs to the Minnesota Timberwolves.
It is hard to be too downbeat on Lakers basketball in 2025, as the honeymoon period from the Doncic heist continues. What the early exit has shown, though, is that this team as of right now is not ready. And with LeBron now being 40 years old, if he is to have one more title run within him, then next year will likely be it. There is therefore a reasonable sense of urgency to be had, even among the positivity, and the Lakers now enter a summer in which they need to be buyers.
James ($52,627,153) and Doncic ($45,999,660) combine for the best part of $100 million, yet six other players (Rui Hachimura, Dorian Finney-Smith, the highly underpaid Reaves, Maxi Kleber and Gabe Vincent) also have eight-figure annual salaries, none of which cost more than Hachimura’s $183 million. And with the exception of Vanderbilt – and Reaves’ player option season in 2026-27 that he absolutely will not be exercising – none of them run beyond next season, either. The luxury tax situation, then, is manageable – the size of the payroll imposes the limitations associated with being in the range of the two aprons explored below. Yet, the sheer spending power exists to pay the luxury tax, no matter how punitive.
In terms of draft capital, they have little to work with. The Lakers have nothing incoming – as in, literally not one – with the majority of their own picks owed in various places around the league. They will likely trade the future assets they have left – highlighted by a 2031 first-round pick, their 2025 first-round pick that becomes eligible to be traded as soon as they have made it, and current rookie Dalton Knecht – but it is not a package that will win the bigger bidding wars.
Instead, selective aggressiveness on the trade market combined with big hits with the minimum salary (leveraging the Doncic/James allure and the number of resulting eyes on the team as incentives) will be the path to building a more competitive team in 2025-26. After all, Dallas gave them the main piece they needed already.
Despite having the revenues and market size as a franchise to be able to underwrite the costs of Doncic’s impending new contract – albeit it will no longer be a “super-max” deal due to having been traded, it will still be enormous – it may still behoove the Lakers to cut costs somewhat around him. This is simply due to the punitive effects of the apron provisions that will reduce the team’s ceiling.
Under the new CBA, teams over the second apron will have no mid-level exception at all to work with in free agency, nor the Bi-Annual Exception, and thus are limited to only the minimum salary. Teams with payrolls over the second apron threshold are no longer able to aggregate contracts to trade for a single player making more money, send out cash in trades, use trade exceptions created in prior seasons, or take back more incoming than outgoing salary in a deal. It shuts down a lot of options in the team-building realm, and, as seen with the draft pick situation, the Lakers were not operating with all that many options anyway.
The good news is that while the risk of the second apron is real, the rising salary cap should just about keep it at bay. In the hypothetical situation where every incumbent player with an option and/or an unguaranteed portion on their 2025-26 contract is retained at their current price, the Lakers are due to have a $191,588,670 payroll, which will be approximately $16 million under the second apron, currently estimated to be set at $207,824,000. That is close enough to be within sight, but not so close as to be inevitable. And because the contracts to Hachimura, Vincent and Kleber all expire after next season, they can be used to match salaries without adding too much to future payroll. The opportunity for one more trade of note therefore exists.
In his 22 seasons in the NBA, LeBron James has had six player options, and declined all of them. For him, they exist as insurance policies more than anything, and his willingness to explore free agency so regularly (and so anomalously for one of the game’s greats, who historically usually have long-term commitments) has helped pioneer a new era in player power. It seems likely that he will stick to what he knows best and go seven-for-seven – after all, the Lakers will always come to the table.
A coveted role player for the best part of a decade now, Finney-Smith’s low-key three-and-D style came to the Lakers in December from the Brooklyn Nets as a part of the D’Angelo Russell deal. He did what he does, averaging 3.6 rebounds in 28.8 minutes per game of regular season play while shooting 39.8 percent from three-point range, and playing versatile and very technically correct defense across a variety of matchups without much in the way of basic counting stats to show for it. Coaches love him more than statistical models do, and they have good reason to.
If he opts into the final year of his deal, Finney-Smith will earn slightly more than the current projected value of the non-taxpayer mid-level exception (which the NBA’s most recent projection put at $14,104,000). Perhaps DFS, who turns 32 this week, would be able to get a full MLE from a rival team with a couple more seasons attached. That said, the decline-and-re-sign option still exists with the Lakers, who appreciate him and have full Bird rights. And by virtue of the rules in the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement, Finney-Smith is in fact immediately eligible for an extension, thus potentially bypassing free agency altogether.
Hayes returned to the Lakers for a second season after exercising the player option on the two-year, $4,628,946 contract he signed in 2023, and with his return came an extended run in the starting lineup. He started 35 regular season games in total, and every game he played in from 30th January onwards, and responded with season averages of 6.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and 0.9 blocks per game on 72.2 percent shooting. For the price of what was as-near-as-is a minimum salary, that is a useful return, and although Hayes has not expanded his game in any meaningful way across his six NBA seasons, he does a solid job in the JaVale McGee role.
Having been with the Lakers for two seasons without changing teams as a free agent, they will have early Bird rights on Hayes, which will allow them to re-sign him to a new contract starting at up to the value of the mid-level exception, without having to use the actual mid-level exception to do it. And given that he enters free agency with better momentum than either of the previous two summers. Hayes will likely want a pay rise commensurate with that rise in performance. Yet the Lakers will be hoping for another near-minimum price instead. He was, after all, a backup forced into a larger role due to circumstance, which speaks to the wider problems facing the team at the five position.
With all due respect to the aforementioned Jaxson Hayes, he only started 35 games due to the lack of alternative options, and his frequent injuries were also part of the problem that the Lakers have faced in their big man rotation since the Doncic trade. Without Davis in the fold, they have had to rely on non-centers such as LeBron or Hachimura to man the five spot at times, or marginal NBA players like Kleber, Alex Len, Markieff Morris and Trey Jemison. Their rebounding shortcomings (grabbing the fifth-fewest rebounds in the league) and leaky interior defence speak to the fact that in the paint, they need an upgrade.
Of course, the Lakers thought they had this upgrade in hand when they also attempted to trade for Mark Williams of the Charlotte Hornets, only for the much-delayed trade to eventually be vetoed due to Williams’ physical examination results. They had anticipated having that piece in place for the 2025 playoffs. As it is, they will have to find a new way to have it in time for 2026.
Someone like Williams fits the profile well, but it does not have to be someone in his mold. A LeBron and Luka-led team will not be quick, yet they need someone who can both anchor the interior defense while providing some verticality and catching-and-finishing potential going the other way. Names like Nic Claxton of the Brooklyn Nets are quite rightly batted around, even since before the Williams debacle, and a deal for a player of his caliber (or potentially even Claxton himself) could make the difference between 2025’s first-round exit and future deep runs, in whatever time LeBron has left.
Perhaps they can go even bigger, and plunder the struggling Miami Heat for All-Star center Bam Adebayo. Having been gift-wrapped a superstar, it is definitely time to consolidate and be buyers in the market, and the need for a big looms large over the offseason as it begins. The Lakers would do the Doncic deal a million more times if they could – of course they would. But that fact notwithstanding, they still need to fill the hole that Anthony Davis left.
