ESPN’s Vincent Goodwill on Giannis & LeBron’s Possible Teams Next Season

There are still four weeks of basketball left, and ESPN's Vincent Goodwill is already being held hostage by two names.

Giannis Antetokounmpo and LeBron James are the dominoes that decide the offseason, and Goodwill came on the show to handicap the most likely landing spots for both.

The Giannis answer used to be easy. He wanted New York. The Knicks wanted him. The math worked. Then the Knicks went and made a deep playoff run, and Goodwill is no longer convinced they will pull the trigger.

"Can you see them making that big of a move with everything that it would take, especially with how well they're playing now?" Goodwill said. "Not to get seduced by how well they're playing now, but can you see them making that type of move if they feel like they are really close to a championship?"

The Knicks dropping off his top of the board reshuffles the whole map. Goodwill ran through the candidates.

"I don't know if Milwaukee wants to send him in conference, but maybe he has to stay east," Goodwill said. "Oklahoma City has the draft capital. Where can you imagine him playing in Oklahoma City with those guys? Or Houston with those guys?"

He flagged Boston as the alternative if Giannis wants to stay in the East. The headline, in his view, is who has the draft capital Milwaukee will demand.

Then came the LeBron piece, and Goodwill cracked.

"He and the future of unfortunately a 41-year-old LeBron James will hold us hostage for the first couple of weeks of July while I'm trying to go on vacation," Goodwill said.

Tom brought up the NBA MVP voting and pointed to a wrinkle. A voter put Luka Doncic as the number two for MVP, despite Doncic not playing in the last two months of the season. The Lakers, on paper, still have an MVP runner-up to build around.

Goodwill wanted no part of the Luka ballot defense.

"I'm a voter, and I can tell you I didn't vote him second," Goodwill said. "I'm not even sure if he'd fall on my ballot."

What interests Goodwill about the Lakers is the role question. Doncic has shown he can be the number one. The question is whether LeBron, at 41 going on 42, can be the number two or three the way that role demands.

"He needs to be available, he needs to defend, he needs to shoot," Goodwill said. "I don't know if LeBron James is any one of those things at this point in his career, and I don't know if that's necessarily the best thing for them."

But Goodwill closed with the most LA reason of all.

"As a retired player, there's no better place to be as a retired NBA player than to be a former Los Angeles Laker," Goodwill said. "That will be your home for the rest of your career, and I don't know if there's a better choice for LeBron James to make than that one."