Despite having a few nagging injuries throughout this season to Pau Gasol and Kobe Bryant, the defending NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers have played pretty well this season and have the second best record in the league right now behind the Cleveland Cavaliers at 38-12.

Recently the Lakers have gotten a lot of attention after Kobe Bryant became the Lakers All-Time leading scorer after passing Jerry West on Monday night against the Memphis Grizzlies with 44 points (ironically West’s number as a player) and Phil Jackson became the winningest coach in Lakers history after passing Pat Riley with 534 wins with a win over the Charlotte Bobcats on Wednesday night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Even though the Lakers have had their fair share of success this season and are looking like legitimate title contender once again this season, it hasn’t stopped the trade rumors involving Andrew Bynum to resurface over the past couple of months as we draw near the NBA trade deadline on February 18th.

A few seasons ago, when Jason Kidd was still with the New Jersey Nets, the Los Angeles Lakers thought about trading their promising young center in exchange for the future hall of fame point guard, but trade talks fell apart which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Despite making the right move not to trade for Jason Kidd, Andrew Bynum has gone down with a knee injury in two consecutive seasons and has really made the Lakers think twice about keeping the big kid around long term.

This season the trade talk has surrounded the Lakers and Andrew Bynum once again as there have been talks of the defending champs trading their young center to the Toronto Raptors for Chris Bosh. Even though the Raptors deny the reports as well as the Lakers, the trade seemed like a good possibility at one point in time, but the talks have died down as of late and it looks like the Lakers are content with their squad according to GM Mitch Kupchak.

“There is no compelling reason to dramatically change this team, in particular its core,” Kupchak said. “We won a championship last year and we feel like we can be as strong this year with the one change we made the Ron Artest change.

“If this is the team we go into the playoffs with, we’ll be happy with our roster, provided we stay healthy. The caveat, as always, is we’ll look at roster flexibility and areas where we can tweak the roster.”