Potential Bulls trade with Lakers for surprising player who isn't Zach LaVine

The Chicago Bulls will continue to be involved in trade rumors until Zach LaVine and Nikola Vucevic are no longer on the roster. 

The LaVine to the Lakers rumor just won’t die, but even if LA were interested, it’s tough to make the money work as we outlined yesterday. 

If the Lakers were desperate enough to add a third star, they could make it happen, but it would deplete their already-thin depth and is LaVine really a significant enough upgrade over D’Angelo Russell to justify the cost and risk? 

As for the Bulls, they’d have to take back some bad money, but would probably be happy to do it to get off LaVine’s remaining deal. 

But there was another possibility mentioned in a recent article in Bleacher Report that ran down some of the trade possibilities for the Lakers. 

Could the Lakers trade with Bulls for Nikola Vucevic? 

In addition to the mandatory LaVine trade, B/R also named Vucevic as an “alternative” the Lakers could be interested in. 

On paper, it’s not a bad match, as Vucevic needs to play with another big who defends the rim and the Lakers happen to have a pretty good one in Anthony Davis, who fancies himself a power forward anyway. 

Theoretically, Vucevic gives LA some additional floor spacing and rebounding and wouldn’t cost nearly as much to acquire in terms of players or draft assets as some of the other possibilities. Even in a down season, Vucevic hit corner 3’s at a fair clip and he’d likely get plenty of wide-open ones in an offense with LeBron and Davis. There’s no reason to think his shooting won’t return. 

Whether Vucevic would really move the needle for them is debatable, but he would upgrade their big-man ranks and is a guy they could afford in a trade. 

So, what would a trade look like?