The Lakers are not consistently drafting at the top of the lottery if Paul stays put. All of them land elsewhere, altering the draft order from and raising a question of whether Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum are in Boston. If his first two seasons with the Lakers did not go according to plan, Paul could have looked elsewhere in , when in reality he was an unrestricted free agent and signed a five-year extension with the Clippers.
He could have gone to the Rockets that summer. The Dallas Mavericks and Atlanta Hawks also pursued. Outside of LeBron joining Paul on the Lakers when both were in their prime, none of these aforementioned scenarios gets Paul any closer to a ring in the past seven years than he got with the Clippers and Rockets. The alternate window for Paul winning a title really would have been with those injury-plagued Lakers.
They won 21 games that first season and landed the No. Odom was a shell of himself after leaving L. So, who wins the Davis sweepstakes instead? New Orleans had the fourth-most Ping Pong balls in Four more wins that season drops their chances at the No.
The seven-win Charlotte Bobcats had the best odds in that lottery at 25 percent, followed by the Washington Wizards The Sacramento Kings would have replaced the Hornets in fourth, rather than their 7.
The Wizards would have been interesting. They won the John Wall lottery two years earlier, and his healthy pairing with Davis would have had the potential to do serious damage in the East. But Cleveland would have been the most interesting landing spot for Davis. The Cavaliers won the Kyrie Irving lottery in They also won the lottery in and , but may not have had the chance with Irving and Davis at the top of the billing.
The Cavs would, however, still have been in position to lure LeBron back to Cleveland. Imagine pairing Davis and James five years before they won a title together in Los Angeles — on a team that beat the win Warriors to win a ring without Davis in That is the foundation of a Cleveland sports dynasty, an alternate ending so bizarre we should probably stop imagining the ramifications here. Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports.
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As Odell Beckham Jr. Holmgren finished with a rather historic stat line on Tuesday during his debut with Gonzaga in a win over Dixie State. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. See our ethics statement. Today, we think about what history would look like if the Lakers had completed their trade for Chris Paul. Within hours, that dream was dead, just one of an apparent multitude of bodies buried during the successful but often despotic reign of former NBA commissioner David Stern.
Whatever you think of the proposed terms of the three-way trade — with the Lakers getting Paul, Pau Gasol going to the Rockets, and New Orleans getting Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Lamar Odom , Goran Dragic and a Knicks first-round pick via Houston — the league being in a position to reject a trade, even in a capacity as owner, that was agreed to by all three teams created an unprecedented situation and the perception of a league conspiracy against the Lakers.
Lakers fans, justifiably, were apoplectic. One of my predecessors on this very blog argued that the season should potentially be cancelled in the aftermath of the veto. How different would Lakers history look? In , Stern threw fellow Lakers villain and king of leaving Magic Johnson on read , Dell Demps, under the bus, saying Demps never had the authority to approve a trade and had lied to Kupchak and Rockets executive Daryl Morey. That team could have done some damage, as Bryant was still very much in his prime, Paul was playing at a near-MVP level, and Bynum had his only All-Star appearance that season, the most productive of his career.
The next summer, though, is when things get really interesting. They actually did pull off a trade for Howard the next summer, sending out Andrew Bynum, Christian Eyenga , Josh McRoberts and a second-round draft pick as part of a four-team deal that landed them Howard along with Earl Clark and Chris Duhon. The Lakers are one of the two most storied franchises in NBA history, with the Celtics being the other.
Instead, a surefire first ballot Hall of Famer finished his career in purple and gold with a combined 48 wins in his last two seasons. What ended up happening: The Lakers imploded. Worse, they saw their long-cursed crosstown rivals grow into the premier franchise in Los Angeles. Today: Things are finally starting to look up. The world may never know. No two players had a deeper will to win than Bryant and Paul, and the two together would have unquestionably been perennial title contenders in Los Angeles.
At 31, Paul still has a lot of efficient basketball in him. And while the Lakers may not have become the promising young team they are today, Paul and possibly Howard could still have carried the torch long after Bryant retired.
What was: Instead of heading to the Lakers, CP3 reshaped the Clippers franchise wallowing in mediocrity. Paul has yet to advance past the Western Conference semifinals victorious, a feat the Clippers could finally accomplish this year barring injury or a meltdown comparable to their blown series lead against Houston.
His status as a Hall of Fame point guard is unquestioned. What could have been: Had the Lakers opted to keep Lamar Odom, things may have panned out differently for the embattled forward.
There even may have been an alternate ending had the original trade to New Orleans gone as planned. With a few more quality acquisitions, that Hornets team could have morphed into a fringe playoff team — good enough to be competitive and exciting, if not good enough to compete for a title.
What was: The trade rocked Odom harder than anyone could have anticipated. A lifelong Laker at heart, he felt betrayed by the organization. Now what?
After the botched first trade, the Lakers opted to move him anyway. Los Angeles dealt him to Dallas, where he was set to be the missing piece for another Mavericks title run.
But the opposite played out. Odom would go on to average 6. The Mavericks eventually sent him to the D-League and he struggled to adjust to life in Dallas. Then, things spun out of control.
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