I know a Celtics fan should never try to help the Lakers. I know I should bite my tongue. I know I should hope Jimmy Buss keeps ruining his family's team, I know I should be hoping that they'll kowtow to Kobe and make the Lakers juuuuuuuust decent enough to be irrelevant, and that a decade of Blowtime would be my best possible outcome here. But here's the problem … I love making fake NBA trades, figuring out blueprints for franchises and determining the fastest, most efficient ways to save them. That's just who I am. I'm a weirdo. I have a folder of iPad bookmarks called "NBA Nerd" that features links for the ESPN.com Trade Machine, HoopsHype's NBA salary page, ShamSports's NBA salary page, Basketball-Reference.com, Hoopdata.com, PER leaders, and the NBA Transactions Archive. I'm like a cross between the Wolf, Olivia Pope and Jerry West. Or I like to think that I am. Again, I'm a weirdo. I genuinely enjoy hypothetically fixing broken NBA franchises. Even ones I can't stand. So after Dwight Howard completed The Indecision and fled Kobe's clutches for the sanctity of barbecue, luxurious strip joints, no state taxes, lower expectations and low-key media pressure Houston, I found myself clicking on the Lakers' salary page just out of curiosity … but then my wheels started turning … and one thing led to another … and suddenly I found myself helping the Lakers. I couldn't resist. Within a few minutes, I was inadvertently hatching a plan that even Rachel Phelps would consider shameless. In the NBA, you want to be either really good or really bad. You never want to land between those two "reallys" for long. You don't want to be squeezed into the no. 8 seed or keep finishing 12th or 13th in every lottery. Basically, you don't want to be the Milwaukee Bucks. (Cut to every Bucks fan nodding vigorously.) If you can't compete for the title, why not bottom out in the most flagrantly offensive way possible? Of course, that's something the Lakers have never, ever done. They picked first in the 1979 and 1982 drafts (Magic and Worthy) by fleecing laughingstock franchises of their draft picks — not by being the laughingstock franchise. They miraculously turned Vlade Divac, three cartons of Marlboro Reds and a pound of phlegm into a raw high schooler named Kobe Bryant. They landed Shaq, Kareem, Wilt and Dwight for a variety of reasons, the biggest being that (a) they're the f-ing Lakers, and (b) celebrities love Los Angeles (we'll get to this). Since they moved to Southern California in 1960, they've won 63.3 percent of their games, appeared in 25 Finals, missed the playoffs just four times, and never won fewer than 30 games. They haven't picked higher than 10th with their own pick since 1975, when they selected Dave Meyers second and promptly traded him in a megadeal for Kareem. No professional sports franchise has been this consistently good for this long: not the Yankees, not the Canadiens, not the Steelers, not anybody. Read more http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9466869/lakers
It's a great article but LeBron isn't leaving a Heat team that would possibly be coming off four straight Finals appearances and potentially three titles.
