Locked On Lakers - Daily Podcast On The Los Angeles Lakers

The rumors linking Kyrie Irving to LeBron James are pretty old hat at this point, but Monday provided a new wrinkle. Instead of Irving heading to LA to join James with the Lakers, The Athletic's Shams Charania reported that Irving has called LeBron to try and get him to come to Dallas.

He's got a fan club there, including Irving, Mavs star Luka Doncic, their coach in Jason Kidd, and more.

But while Charania's report got everyone's attention, and fast, the actual mechanics of getting James to Dallas are laughably hard. Maybe he'd accept a buyout, if the Lakers would actually offer him one, which they won't. And even then, it seems unlikely he'd leave the kind of money on the table that he'd have to sacrifice to go from a team that made the Western Conference Finals to one that just missed the playoffs. So what about a trade?

Well, have you looked at the Mavericks' roster lately? Woof.

What if Dallas included as much draft capital as possible, including the 10th pick in this year's Draft? Well, maybe that gets Rob Pelinka's attention, and maybe then only if James demanded to be moved, and threatened to tank the season if he didn't get his way. Not likely, given his history on the court. The notion he'd risk one of his last seasons in the NBA to leverage a trade seems far fetched.

So what does this amount to? A good conversation about how the market for Kyrie may not be what he'd hoped, how challenging the task of getting him to Los Angeles will be (and why, therefore, it's unlikely) and how Dallas is in really, really bad shape. Very little room to maneuver, almost forced to give Kyrie a max, but without any real depth or appealing trade material to improve the team.

Meanwhile, Monday's show focused a great deal on how Frank Vogel's hiring in Phoenix could impact Darvin Ham's staff. But how might it impact the perception of Ham, as a coach?

HOSTS: Andy and Brian Kamenetzky

SEGMENT 1: Kyrie wants to bring LeBron to Dallas. Good luck with that.

SEGMENT 2: Is there a trade offer Dallas could make that would get Rob Pelinka's attention?

SEGMENT 3: If Vogel coaches the Suns to a better record next season than the Lakers under Ham, how will fans react?

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