Ahead of Wednesday night's meeting between the Los Angeles Lakers and Cleveland Cavaliers — the first of two matchups between the two clubs in the next month, and Kobe Bryant's final visit to Ohio before he retires at the end of this season — ESPN.com's Brian Windhorst dropped a what-if bombshell: in the summer of 2007, the Lakers called the Cavs to find out if trading Kobe to Cleveland could net them LeBron James.
It's a mind-boggling thing to consider now, eight and a half years later, but at the time, a 28-year-old Bryant was coming off his second straight scoring title, at the peak of his powers, and pretty ticked off about the Lakers falling from perennial NBA Finalists to playoff also-rans following the acrimony-filled dissolution of his partnership with Shaquille O'Neal.
James, just 22, was coming off his coming-out party, a season in which he'd logged his second straight top-five finish in MVP voting and carried a talent-poor Cavaliers roster all the way to the NBA Finals, vanquishing the Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference finals thanks to one of the greatest individual performances in recent NBA playoff history before falling to the overwhelming San Antonio Spurs in the championship round.
Kobe wanted change — most notably in the form of a public push to trade young center Andrew Bynum — and the Lakers sought some ... albeit, apparently, not quite the brand for which Bryant bargained. From Windhorst's report:
"At that time, the Lakers had to do something. I was just losing faith in what they were trying to do. It was like I was a meal ticket," Bryant told ESPN's Baxter Holmes this week. "You come out and score 40, 50 points, fill the seats, we're going to keep the payroll at a minimum, generate revenue. It's like, look, listen, I am not with that, dude. I have to win without Shaq. I've got to do it. We've got to do something." [...]
According to multiple sources, as the Lakers went through their options, a call was placed to the Cavs. The intent of the call, sources said, was clear: Would the Cavs make James available in a potential deal for Bryant?
Those who worked in Cleveland's front office remember it for one reason: It was the only time a team had ever called and made an offer for James. He was considered an ultimate untouchable. Frankly, until that time, so was Bryant. [...]
"I believe it," James told ESPN.com's Dave McMenamin this week about the 2007 offer. "If you give up one big fish, you got to give a big fish too."
The Cavs said that James, indeed, was untouchable, sources said. Then they attempted to make the Lakers a different offer for Bryant, offering anyone else on their team in a package for him. The Lakers had no interest.
Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak declined comment on the matter this week.
For Bryant, who had a no-trade clause in his contract, the answer was simple.
"I never would've approved it. Never. The trade to go to Cleveland? Never," Bryant told Holmes. "That wasn't one of the teams that was on my list. It was Chicago, San Antonio [or] Phoenix."
Before we get any further: Color me shocked that Kupchak wasn't eager to continue the Kobe conversation once the Cavs countered with the pick of a litter that included Larry Hughes, Drew Gooden, Boobie Gibson, Sasha Pavlovic, Damon Jones, Eric Snow, shaky-footed Zydrunas Ilgauskas and early-onset Anderson Varejao!
As it happened, Bryant nearly made it to one of those preferred destinations, with Kupchak engaging the Chicago Bulls on a deal that would reportedly have sent guard Ben Gordon, swingman Luol Deng and young big men Joakim Noah and Tyrus Thomas to L.A., but that evidently fell apart based on Bryant's insistence that Deng stick around"They had me playing around with Smush Parker.")
Bryant also shut down another deal that fall that would have sent him to the Pistons because, as he told Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical back in 2013, "It hit me that I didn't really want to walk out on Dr. [Jerry] Buss," the Lakers owner with a long-proven track record of being able to revitalize the franchise with new talent whenever it began to lag. Several months later, Bynum was off to an All-Star-caliber start to the season, the Lakers were able to snag Pau Gasol from the Memphis Grizzlies, another title run was in the works and Kobe had a much sunnier disposition about sticking around. James, for his part, just kept on becoming one of the greatest players the game has ever seen, leading the league in scoring and beginning a run of eight straight All-NBA First Team appearances.
Even if the conversation never got beyond "Are you interested?" and "Nope," the fact that it happened shows just how seriously Buss, Kupchak and the rest of the Lakers' brass took Kobe's venomous response to three years of decline, and how big the late Dr. Buss's administration thought when it came to roster-building. If you were going to move on from a player as iconic and influential as Kobe in his prime, you were going to have to land a pretty monstrous return, and pre-peak LeBron sure qualifies.
The conversation also creates a fascinating number of thought experiments that ripple out from its center. If Cleveland says yes, and LeBron gets to L.A., does he ever wind up taking his talents to South Beach? Would a Kobe-led Cavs squad have stood a better chance of getting out of the East in '07-'08 and '08-'09 than LeBron's model? Would the Earth have collapsed under the weight of Kobe's Cavs taking on the Big Three Celtics?
With Kobe moved out and LeBron in tow, would L.A. have ever made the trade for Gasol, and if not, would the NBA world at large ever have developed the appreciation for Pau's excellence that came thanks in part to the blinding spotlight trained on all things Lakers? For that matter, how would this have affected the likes of Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade, Dwight Howard, Kevin Love and all the other stars who have moved in the orbits of Kobe and LeBron over the years?
Does Kobe finish up with fewer than the five rings he now has? Does LeBron have more than the two he won in Miami? Would any of this in any meaningful way have impacted literally anything about the metronomic consistency and excellence of the San Antonio Spurs?
None of the questions have answers, of course; thanks to what sounds like a brief conversation nearly nine years ago, all of these points became moot. But sometimes pointless things are fun to think about, all the same, and this whopper-that-wasn't can now take its rightful place alongside some of the other mega-deals that never quite got consummated, like Ted Williams for Joe DiMaggio, Charles Barkley for James Worthy, Shawn Kemp for Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan for any five Los Angeles Clippers players or draft picks. If nothing else, I like the idea of Lakers fans bargaining with themselves over whether they'd have given up any of Kobe's career for the chance to employ LeBron in his prime, and I really like the idea of Kobe getting an opportunity to unleash his death stare on Mike Brown a few years earlier.
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