Adding this guard would give LA a new “Big Three.”
Washington Wizards shooting guard Bradley Beal, a three-time All-Star who has been waylaid by a rash of injuries over the past two seasons, could be an interesting fit for your Los Angeles Lakers, should the team want to prioritize another “Big Three” over its current roster depth. From Beal’s perspective, it might behoove him to agitate for a trade of his newly-signed maximum contract with the Wiz to LA, where he would go from being perhaps the best player on a middling team to the third-best player on a pretty good one.
From the Lakers’ perspective, things get a bit more complicated. I for one think this current plan, of fielding really good, three-point shooting-heavy depth around LA stars LeBron James and Anthony Davis, may make more sense than adding an aging star ball-handler whose three-point shot has grown streakier of late (sound familiar?). That said, Beal in LA would be a fascinating experience. And it’s unclear just how happy he is with the roster construction in D.C.
If you’d like to liberally read some tea leaves, take a look at this new Beal interview with Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson of Bally Sports, in which Beal dances around the fact that Wizards general manager Tommy Sheppard dealt away combo forward Rui Hachimura to LA in exchange for Kendrick Nunn’s expiring contract and picks — i.e. a team sort of hoping to make the play-in tournament, led by Beal, got demonstrably worse.
“[Making that choice is] Shepp’s job,” Beal told Robinson. “That’s his decision, you know? All we have to do is fill in and kind of filter and how that envisions, how that works with all of us and play into that, you know? But for the most part, we let him handle all that.”
“Shepp has the toughest job in the world,” Beal conceded. “I don’t want to have a job where I’m telling or picking or choosing who’s going, so it’s tough. But all I can do is trust what he’s got going. That’s all I can do.”
