How this month’s trade deadline could shape next year’s Lakers.
Meet the new Los Angeles Lakers. Not the same as the old Los Angeles Lakers.
By the end of February 9th’s trade deadline for the 2022-23 NBA season, LA had taken a wrecking ball to its depth and totally rebalanced its roster. The Lakers added significant three-point shooting (via new starting point guard D’Angelo Russell, new starting shooting guard Malik Beasley, new reserve center Mo Bamba, and new reserve forward Rui Hachimura), post defense (thanks to Bamba and new starting power forward Jarred Vanderbilt), scoring creativity (through Russell), and size (everyone) to a team in desperate need of quality depth.
Per Jovan Buha of The Athletic, Los Angeles team vice president of basketball operations believes that this latest crop of Lakers (featuring a whopping five new big-minutes rotation players!) can carry over into the 2023-24 NBA season.
“I think a deep dive into this, you can almost look at it as ‘pre-agency,’ ” Rob Pelinka told reporters on a call the weekend immediately following this year’s trade deadline.
“If you really study the contracts of these five players, we very intentionally planned these moves to provide optionality in July,” Pelinka continued. “Some of these players have team options or team-controlled years on their contracts, which again gives us the ability to see how these last 26 regular-season games and how potential postseason games go. And then we can go into this offseason with a higher collection of data points, and sort of a real-time analysis of how the pieces fit and make decisions for the future.”
It will be fascinating to see how many of these new Lakers pieces will remain with the club next year. Russell is an unrestricted free agent, while Hachimura is a restricted free agent. Beasley and Bamba are both on fairly reasonable non-guaranteed, mid-market deals.
Even deep-bench reserve shooting guard Davon Reed (not a normal part of the team’s rotation, at least not so far) is on a non-guaranteed contract, and could be released this summer if he doesn’t make an impact this year. Among the new additions, only Vanderbilt is signed to a guaranteed deal through next year.
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