Colin Cowherd: Now is the Perfect Time to Trade Anthony Davis

Anthony Davis has been on an absolute heater over the past few games. He’s recorded four straight 30-point double-doubles and put up his most dominant statline in years last night against the Phoenix Suns, scoring 37 points on 11-of-17 shooting and hauling in 21 rebounds. AD seems to have shaken off his early injury troubles to step up in a big way for a Los Angeles Lakers team missing LeBron James.

For most, it’s an extremely encouraging sign that Davis can, indeed, be the 1B to LeBron’s 1A and has served as a reminder of how damn good Davis can be when he’s rolling. For Colin Cowherd, it presents the best opportunity the Lakers will have to trade the star big man for as big a return as possible and they should pull the trigger.

You can see the logic, I guess. But this once again strikes you as more of a video game trade than a real-life trade. LeBron’s sidekick is finally reaching his potential and you move him? Yeah, he isn’t going to play like this all year and it’s even likely that this will be his best stretch of the season but team morale would take a huge blow no matter what kind of return Los Angeles got. It just isn’t realisitic.

It’s also hard to imagine any return being truly worth it. We’re still in the early stages of the year when all but a few obvious tanking teams can talk themselves into a play-in spot and thus aren’t going to unload a bunch of useful players for Davis. They’d only trade for AD if they were getting the better end of the deal and the Lakers are not in a position to trade their only other star for anything less than an obscene return.

In theory, Cowherd is right. In practice, no chance it’ll happen.