Jerry West made a serious push to acquire the draft rights to Tracy McGrady one year after he acquired Kobe Bryant.

McGrady had an even more impressive workout for the Lakers than Bryant did.

“I don’t think anybody can look at an 18-year-old and say he’s a Hall of Famer,” Del Harris said. “You couldn’t even do that with Jordan. And Kobe was a young 18 in his first season. He was still in a pretty normal teenage body, compared to when LeBron James came in and had a man’s body.

“McGrady came in the next year with a more mature body and worked out so well that Jerry kind of tooled around with the idea that maybe we should just go ahead and make a deal for whatever it took to get this guy — even though it’d be a step back in the short term — to have two guys like this on the same team.”

The Lakers could have had a Big 3 of Bryant, McGrady and Shaquille O'Neal, though there's no way to know how those three players would have developed with each other, let alone exist off the court.

Jerry Buss shot down the idea of trading for McGrady as the fear was that it would take them out of title contention as they would have likely had to trade Eddie Jones. The Lakers eventually traded Jones for Glen Rice.