The Lakers trade rumors are coming in hot as the February trade deadline approaches, and head coach Darvin Ham has addressed those rumors directly.
After the Lakers’ much-needed 112-105 win over the Thunder on Monday night, Ham admitted that the front office are likely to look at upgrading the roster.
“People talk about trades and this and that,” Ham told reporters.”No one’s sugarcoating anything. You have an opportunity to get better, you’re going take advantage of it. But that said, what we have in that locker room, we just need to buckle down, focus, take care of the details. We have more than enough in that locker room to make some things happen.”
LA have battled with injury, illness and finding a consistent lineup that works all season, and are only sitting at 10th in the West with 20-21 record because of it.
“We haven’t been completely healthy,” Davis told reporters after the win over OKC. “I mean we’ve been in games a lot this year. But we’ve been having a lot of injuries, which is always tough. The times we were healthy – completely healthy – we played great basketball. So we know what we can be. But I think we just got to get healthy fully healthy.”
The Lakers have been heavily linked to a number of big name players and deals, like Zach LaVine, Clint Capela and Dejounte Murray, as well as a trade deals with the Grizzlies and Trail Blazers.
But deals like these may just all be pipe dreams, according to ESPN’s Brian Windhorst.
“There’s no teams interested in calling the Lakers for the players that they want to trade,” he said.
“… The Lakers have to go through this homestand and figure out whether they’re gonna do something, but even if they want to, they don’t have guys who have high value right now like the Raptors have had over the past few months. I don’t even know if it’s comparable.”
He also thinks that there’s a “zero percent chance” that the Lakers trade for LaVine.
READ MORE: The Latest NBA Trade Rumors as Deadline Inches Closer