Draymond Green isn’t too worried if the Lakers land Irving Kyrie to their side this summer. According to Green, the Lakers can’t beat them if LeBron James and Irving Kyrie are paired via Bleacher Reports;
If the Los Angeles Lakers somehow find a way to land Kyrie Irving this summer, they would be a major title contender this upcoming season.
Not that Draymond Green is too worried about it.
“With LeBron James, if you give them someone like Kyrie… they’ll have a chance because of the way Kyrie can score the basketball,” Green told Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg. “LeBron will only put him in a position to do that. Kyrie has not proven to be a great leader. LeBron will put an umbrella over that. If you can do what you’re good at, you have LeBron leading.”
“They could contend, but they won’t beat us.”
Of course, Irving ending up on the Lakers is a major long shot. First, he would have to decline his $36.5 million player option and decide he wants to leave the Brooklyn Nets.
There’s no doubt that adding Irving would make the Lakers one of the biggest threats to unseat the Warriors, alongside teams like the Phoenix Suns and a healthy Los Angeles Clippers in the West and a slew of contenders from the East.
But Green isn’t sweating it. And he likely won’t have to, considering an Irving defection to Los Angeles still feels like an improbability.
I think the Lakers would have a better chance with Kyrie than Russell Westbrook, but at this point of his career, Kyrie can’t really be trusted to be around the entire season. You also can’t expect LeBron and Anthony Davis to be healthy all year as well. They would have to be extremely lucky and all be healthy going into the playoffs to get out of the Western Conference.
Do you think a healthy Big 3 of LeBron, Kyrie and Anthony Davis could be the Warriors?
Flip to the next pages to see how Twitter reacted to Draymond’s proclamation.