Would LeBron James have joined the Golden State Warriors if they’d traded for Anthony Davis? We’ll never know, but a portion of the team’s front office wanted to try.
According to Logan Murdock of The Ringer, “a small contingent of Golden State’s front office” wanted to trade Jimmy Butler and presumably some number of draft picks for the Washington Wizards’ center, but ultimately decided not to for two reasons:
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Anthony Davis and his agent, Rich Paul, have made it clear he wants an extension.
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He’s injured a lot, playing just 29 games since the Dallas Mavericks inexplicably traded Luka Doncic to get from the Lakers in early 2025.
Look, if you’re too injury-prone for the Warriors, that’s really saying something. Kristaps Porzingis missed 90 games the last two seasons and the Warriors gave him $40M. Of course, they could have simply traded for Davis and hoped he would play for the $121M still left on his existing contract, but perhaps they just didn’t want Paul to call them over and over asking about it.
And who knows if James would have come anyway? It’s not like Paul hasn’t used one of his clients to get another one of his clients paid before. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who just got a buyout from the Memphis Grizzlies to join James on the Philadelphia 76ers, signed a $17.75M deal with the Lakers in 2017. He got that deal in part so Paul had an excuse to talk to the front office without tampering, a year ahead of James’ free agency.
Two years later, when the Lakers traded for Davis, Rob Pelinka made the trade official before the NBA draft, which cost him a chance to offer Kawhi Leonard a full max contract. Paul agreed to have Davis waive his $4M trade kicker, but only if the Lakers agreed to re-sign KCP if The Claw went elsewhere. Leonard went to the Clippers, since the Lakers didn’t offer him a no-show endorsement deal with a shady tree-planting company, and Caldwell-Pope got a two-year deal.
We’d say that Davis was likely to play more games than Butler next season, but Danny Emmerman claimed Butler was trying to come back to the Warriors “as early as Christmas.” That seems unlikely, but so does the idea of Anthony Davis going a whole season without pulling his hamstring, or spraining his ankle, or crashing a scooter while recovering from plantar fasciitis.
The real question is, How big was this small contingent of front office people and were any of them named Lacob? If the answer is, zero Lacobs, it makes sense why the deal never got done.
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