Raptors, Pistons, Hawks rumored in trade battle for former Lakers NBA champion

Billy Heyen

Raptors, Pistons, Hawks rumored in trade battle for former Lakers NBA champion image

The top of the Eastern Conference features a bunch of teams hoping to make their mark.

In part because of injuries, the East feels wide open, and teams like the Detroit Pistons, Toronto Raptors and Atlanta Hawks are trying to take advantage.

That could set one of them up to try and make a huge splash on the trade market.

And one name they could all be after? Anthony Davis.

The former Lakers superstar, who went to the Dallas Mavericks in the Luka Doncic trade, is a candidate to be dealt again.

ESPN's Shams Charania wrote Tuesday that all three of the Pistons, Raptors and Hawks could be involved.

"The Pistons (19-5), Raptors (15-10) and Hawks (14-11) represent high-level threats in their conference and are having seasons that give hope that a player like Davis -- a 10-time All-Star who has spent his entire career in the Western Conference -- can elevate them into a viable championship-quality team," Charania writes.

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Davis isn't the player he once was, and he comes with plenty of injury risk.

But the Mavs may be interested at this point in moving off of him and starting to fully embrace a timeline centered around 18-year old Cooper Flagg.

It'd be a quick decision to give up on AD, but the Mavericks got rid of Nico Harrison, the GM who made the brutal Luka trade in the first place. They don't have to stick by Davis just to act like it wasn't that bad a move.

Dallas needs to look toward the future, while these Eastern Conference contenders begin to focus more on the present.

Davis could push a team over the top, even now. It'll be up to Detroit, Toronto and Atlanta to decide how much they want to push their chips to the center of the table.

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