The Los Angeles Lakers, with their playoff hopes gone and their franchise player done for the season, will be using the last three months of their campaign in acquiring assets to speed up their rebuilding effort.
For the second consecutive season, the Lakers will miss the postseason with Bryant having an early vacation due to a season-ending injury (torn rotator cuff) before All-Star break.
The Lakers are currently on a nine-game losing streak - which is the longest since April 1994 - and second to last in the Western Conference standings with a dismaying 12-34.
Still, the team couldn't ask for more. After all, many analysts expected them to struggle this season after striking out on several elite free-agents last summer and parading a roster consist most of journeymen and expiring contracts.
Bleacher Report Sr. NBA writer Kevin Ding believes the Lakers' road to contention has become much clearer as Bryant steps closer to the end of his career.
Fortunately for the Lakers, they have enough assets on their table to turn things around quickly, perhaps the soonest as next season when Bryant guns for his sixth NBA championship ring for the very last time.
With a salary space estimated at $25M, the Lakers are certainly capable of forming a formidable team by signing a max contract-worth player or two budding stars, even in a very competitive Western Conference.
The Lakers also possess two first-rounder - one is top-5 protected and the other was acquired in a trade with the Houston Rockets for Jeremy Lin.
According to Ding, the Lakers have to decide whether to use the pick for one of the available talents in the 2015 draft or package it for legit star. For the NBA analyst, the latter makes more sense because it's still very much uncertain at this point if this player (JaHill Okafor and Emanuel Mudiay) could turn into impact player right away.
"So, yes, keeping the pick is a big deal-but it very well might be more important as a trade asset than for some raw talent who almost surely will be just finishing his freshman year in college. The Lakers also likely will get Houston's 2015 first-round pick from the Lin salary dump, but it won't be any higher than 15."
"Packaging that 2015 top-five pick, if the Lakers keep it, in a trade for a high-level player Buss and Kupchak deeply believe in would be an ideal way to hasten the rebuilding process."
And there's indeed no shortage of talents available for the Lakers to look into using its top-5 protected pick. It's just a matter of picking the player that fits the mold of an ideal championship team cornerstone.
