There is no situation in the NBA more fluid than the one involving Kawhi Leonard and the San Antonio Spurs. Each day, a new report surfaces indicating the state of trade talks between San Antonio and other teams. Sometimes, the reports that come out involve the Spurs’ current feelings about where their relationship stands with Leonard.
Basically, no one seems like they really know anything at this point, largely because many people expected the Los Angeles Lakers to have acquired Leonard to pair with LeBron James by now. As it turns out, there could be a reason behind that: The Lakers reportedly haven’t tried all that hard yet.
On the latest edition of The Woj Podcast, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski explained that Los Angeles hasn’t shown too terribly much urgency in trying to make a deal with the Spurs.
“The Lakers have shown, so far in these talks with San Antonio, if any of us thought that they were going to feel an urgency to get a deal done, they haven’t,” Wojnarowski said. “They haven’t. There’s nothing about these talks that make you think they feel like they have to get Kawhi Leonard now, and maybe it’s posturing, maybe it’ll intensify, maybe they’ll try and wait the Spurs out.”
There are two ways to look at this. One is that the Lakers feel confident Leonard will be theirs next summer, so breaking up their core to meet the Spurs’ reportedly insane asking price would be a bad idea. The other is that taking a more prudent approach to a potential free agent has burned Los Angeles recently, as Paul George went from wanting to play for the team to signing a long-term deal elsewhere over the course of a year.
As has been the case ever since Leonard’s trade request became public, it’ll be fascinating to see if the Lakers eventually push all their chips to the center of the table and try to make a trade happen. But for now, they seem perfectly content to sit back and let the process play out.
