Paul George Insists He’d Be A Laker If The Pacers Hadn’t Traded Him


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Paul George really wants Los Angeles to know he wasn’t just playing them, and that he really wanted to be a Laker before he arrived in Oklahoma City.

All the buzz last summer was that the L.A. native was set on pushing his way to the Lakers when he made his trade request to the Indiana Pacers. That assumption is why Indiana struggled to find a trade package for him, ultimately settling on a deal with the Thunder most felt at the time was pennies on the dollar — all though the performance of Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis has changed that over the past year.

So, this summer when he inked a long-term deal with the Thunder at midnight and celebrated with cigars on-stage with Russell Westbrook and Nas as Westbrook’s house in front of hundreds of people, those in L.A. were left wondering what happened. Since re-signing with OKC, pledging his allegiance to Russ and the Thunder, George has made it a point to make sure L.A. knows he still has love for the city.

He recently spoke to The Undefeated’s Marc J. Spears and insisted that it was a 50-50 decision entering last summer for him, and wouldn’t have even been a choice had he never left Indiana.

“It was 50-50 on deciding whether I wanted to come back home or if it was smarter to be in the situation I am in now,” George told The Undefeated. “But it wasn’t overstated. I wanted to play in L.A. That is where I wanted to go. Had that trade never went down, had I played one more year in Indy, I would have been in a Lakers uniform.”

He told Ben Golliver of Sports Illustrated something very similar in a July profile of the star and what went into his decision making.

“When I told the Pacers I wanted to play [in LA], that was true feelings,” said George, a native of Palmdale, Calif. “I wanted to come back home. To play for home, to put that jersey on for family and for what I grew up watching. I wanted to carry that legacy. But I went to Oklahoma, fell in love with it and I’m happy with the decision.”

George is doing two things with these public statements. One, he’s trying to do damage control with perception of him pushing his way out of Indiana by insisting he wanted to be in L.A., only to sign on long-term in another small market. The other is to try and repair his image in Los Angeles, who he spurned after a year of rumors that him signing with the Lakers was all but a done deal.

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