On March 1, Beijing time, according to the news of NBA celebrity Shams, the Los Angeles Lakers will choose to cut Jordan Jr. next to free up space to sign DJ Augustine. In this season's NBA regular season, Jordan Jr. has played a total of 32 games with the Lakers so far, during which he has averaged 4.1 points, 5.4 rebounds and 0.8 blocks per game, and the overall court performance looks actually quite sluggish.
However, the Lakers decided to lay off Jordan Jr. at this time, which also caused a lot of complaints from the outside world. You know, if the Lakers can send Jordan Jr. before the trade deadline, instead of parting ways with Jordan Jr. by cutting it now, the Lakers can actually save about $5 million in luxury taxes. But obviously the Lakers management does not seem to be aware of this, so it is also the result that the Lakers can only continue to bear jordan's season salary contract, so that they can not reduce the team's luxury tax burden to a certain extent.
According to the Lakers' current lineup combination, the Western Conference team's luxury tax this season has been as high as $46 million. And if you can offer chips by opening Jordan Jr. + the second round of picks before, you actually have the opportunity to throw Jordan Jr. to other teams with enough salary space. For example, the Thunder team that has been rebuilt this season, they have a salary space of 34 million US dollars, so the Thunder team can directly eat jordan's contract, so as long as the Lakers can give the asset chips of the second round, I believe the Thunder team will not refuse this deal.
But helplessly, the Lakers management did not make any moves at that time, but when the door to the NBA trading market was completely closed, the Lakers management decided to officially dump Jordan Jr., which undoubtedly reflected the inferior trading ability of the Lakers management. Now think about it is very funny, this season's luxury tax amount of close to 50 million US dollars of the Lakers, in the end is likely to be unable to enter the NBA League playoffs, and if not to carry out heavyweight trading operations, I am afraid that next season the Lakers will still be unable to make a difference in the Western Division, James's final peak of his career may really be wasted by the Lakers management!