The Los Angeles Lakers now have max-level salary-cap room in NBA free agency. How should they spend it?
With the Washington Wizards agreeing to join the Lakers' deal with the New Orleans Pelicans for Anthony Davis -- as reported by ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski, Zach Lowe and Bobby Marks -- L.A. can now complete it as an over-the-cap team after using more than $30 million in cap space rather than needing to use part of their room to facilitate the trade. That means an extra $8-9 million in spending power for the Lakers.
Would the Lakers be better off pursuing a single max free agent or splitting up their cap space multiple ways to fill out a roster that now features just three players under contract? Let's take a look at their options.
The case for a single max target
The three-stars formula has translated into championships for LeBron James in both Miami and Cleveland, and structuring the Davis deal this way gives the Lakers an opportunity to build a similar core. Depending on whether they retain the rights to restricted free agents Alex Caruso and Johnathan Williams, the Lakers could have enough money to make a max offer to a player with 7-9 years of experience such as Kawhi Leonard or Jimmy Butler.
If he's interested, the Lakers should obviously sign Leonard coming off a second Finals MVP, as he led the Toronto Raptors to the NBA championship. Butler is a slightly more difficult choice given his track record of creating drama in multiple locker rooms and, perhaps more importantly, his age (he'll turn 30 by the time training camp starts).
As my colleague Zach Lowe has noted on The Lowe Post, getting a third star is a hedge against injury to either AD or LeBron. We've seen what New Orleans teams built around AD and weaker role players than the Lakers would have can do, and they haven't been good enough to contend. If the Lakers go strictly for role players around Davis and James, they'll be putting tremendous pressure on a single healthy star (plus Kyle Kuzma) to create shots and log heavy minutes in case of an injury to the other player.
It's also possible that going for a single star could be the Lakers' best path to adding a younger player to their core if the Brooklyn Nets are forced to withdraw their qualifying offer to D'Angelo Russell, making him an unrestricted free agent.
Just 23, Russell is much younger than the role players the Lakers would realistically be pursuing, and his smaller maximum salary (an estimated $27.25 million) would give the team more cap flexibility. It could, for example, max out Russell while retaining full Bird rights to shooting guard Reggie Bullock, allowing the Lakers to go over the cap to re-sign Bullock for any amount. That would at least enable the Lakers to build a full starting five using their space before dipping into their room midlevel exception (projected at $4.8 million) and offers for the veterans minimum to build a bench.
The case for spreading out the money
There's a key difference between the LeBron big threes in Cleveland and Miami and the one the Lakers might build: Those teams did have useful role players in place. The Heat started out with Mario Chalmers, Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller and didn't win a championship until after signing Shane Battier in free agency the year after James and Chris Bosh. The Cavaliers brought Tristan Thompson and didn't become a contender until after dealing for Timofey Mozgov, Iman Shumpert and JR Smith midway through the 2014-15 season.
Those kinds of players wouldn't be around if the Lakers went for the big three model, as they'd have only the room exception to offer anyone more than the minimum. If the entire room exception went to a single player, it's possible the Lakers could have an unprecedented 10 players making the minimum. Even given the desire for players to join a contending team in L.A. and the possibility of upgrading the roster with reinforcements on the buyout market (as the Heat's second championship team did with Chris Andersen), we're talking about a historically top-heavy team.
I'm skeptical that such a roster could compete at the highest levels of NBA competition. We saw during the NBA Finals when Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson were sidelined how overtaxed the Golden State Warriors' minimum-salary players were in larger roles than usual. That brought the Warriors down to just five rotation players making more than the minimum, same as the Lakers would have.
Additionally, the Lakers' using all their cap space would prevent them from a unique opportunity to take advantage of how the league handles incentives. Player incentives that are considered unlikely to be achieved based on the previous season's results can be up to 15% of a player's annual salary, but those unlikely incentives count against the cap when the player is signed -- and any time a team uses cap space to sign a player with unlikely incentives.
If, however, a player is signed without unlikely incentives, those previous ones that are unlikely no longer factor into the team's cap room. So the Lakers can build heavy unlikely incentives that are actually good bets to be paid -- for example, for making the playoffs or winning 41 games -- without those counting against the cap as long as the final player signed does not have any such incentives. Depending on the size of the final contract signed using cap space, that could potentially give the Lakers something like $5 million extra to spend this summer so long as they split the money up among multiple players.
The verdict: Selective targets for Lakers at the max
Based on this analysis, the Lakers should be selective with their max targets. Taking a look at my multiyear projections for free agents reinforces this notion. Let's say, optimistically, the Lakers could sign four players using their cap space: Patrick Beverley (11.4 projected wins above replacement over the next three years), holdover Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (12.0), Trevor Ariza (10.8) and Bullock (7.7). That would be a total of 41.9 wins above replacement from their cap space over the next three years.
Over that span, those four players would coincidentally project to be exactly as valuable as Leonard -- the top free agent on the market after Kevin Durant's Achilles rupture eliminated his 2019-20 projection. I would still take Leonard over those four players because of the value of concentrating talent and the probability that the Lakers can get more value from minimum-salary contracts than other teams. But I would be inclined to take those four players over Butler, who is projected to provide 37.4 wins over the next three years and at more risk of aging over that span than Leonard.
Because of his age and his smaller maximum, Russell is the toughest call for me. The Lakers could get him and re-sign Bullock, providing an estimated total of 36.7 wins above replacement over the next three years. I'd still probably suggest pursuing Russell if he becomes an unrestricted free agent because he's more likely to hold his value beyond the next three years than any of the Lakers' other targets.
If Leonard and Russell say no, I'd be more confident in the Lakers' chances if they split things up and pursued multiple players to fill out the roster.