This week on “I Love Basketball,” Sabreena Merchant and I look back on the Dennis Schröder-Los Angeles Lakers era. Everything about it requires some level of nuance, whether it’s regarding trading for him in the first place, his play leading up to the contract extension talks, the reported Kyle Lowry trade and the eventual collapse that led to his free agency fiasco.
Dennis Schröder feels like the kind of player that we’ll be able to look back on one day and link a lot of the decisions the Lakers made back to his tenure.
As one of the very few people who didn’t like the Schröder trade at the time, Sabreena is uniquely positioned to yell at all us idiots who thought it was a smart move. She’s far too nice to do any of that, but she did fairly speak to why this puts the Lakers in such a tough spot moving forward.
This led to a conversation about Rob Pelinka in general and why it’s impossible to fully analyze him as an NBA executive. Once again, the answer to whether Pelinka is good at his job is somewhere in the middle, contrary to the evisceration people on Twitter are giving me credit for.
From there, we touch on the reports of the Lakers being even kind of interested in Isaiah Thomas (no thank you), then wrap up by having some fun looking back at the 2009 championship team. We could talk about that team forever.
You can listen to the full episode below, and to make sure you never miss a show, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.
And for a short-form recap pod, check out Lakers Lowdown, in which Anthony Irwin recaps the previous day’s news and gets you ready for the day ahead in LakerLand, every weekday morning on the Silver Screen & Roll Podcast feed. You can follow Sabreena at @Sabreenajm