Los Angeles Lakers: Injuries derailing lineup cohesion and could affect trade deadline activity
Already sliding in the standings, the Los Angeles Lakers are struggling to field a competitive team with injuries piling up, affecting their abilities to make trades at the deadline.
Coming into the 2017-18 NBA regular season, not much was expected out of the Los Angeles Lakers in terms of making a serious run at a playoff spot in the Western Conference. The Lakers’ roster was a mixture of young players not near their prime, veterans on the backside of their career and players who have had their names thrown in trade rumors since last summer.
Combine this montage of players with the stacked talent teams in the West possess, and it’s easy to see why the Lakers are 15-29 as of Jan. 18. But injuries have played a major part this season, forcing head coach Luke Walton to play sporadic rotations and limit opportunities to establish cohesion.
Larry Nance Jr. missed four weeks. Brook Lopez missed two weeks. Brandon Ingram has missed three games and doesn’t seem to be 100 percent in recent weeks. And Lonzo Ball is injured at the moment. The Lakers miss Lonzo’s injury the most given how important his passing, defense and ability to control tempo is, not to mention their lack of guard depth in general. Los Angeles is 0-8 in games he’s missed.
Now small knocks are starting to linger throughout the roster, including Kyle Kuzma (strained left hand) and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (right Achilles strain) being the latest to find themselves on the injury report. These aren’t severe, but the Lakers can’t afford to have any players miss time, especially another starter and their best player off the bench.
These injuries have forced the Lakers to play lineups that haven’t logged a great deal of time together, on top of the dramatic drop-off in talent. The bench is thinner with Tyler Ennis and Josh Hart forced into the starting lineup with Lonzo and Ingram missing time, putting an increased stress on Jordan Clarkson and Kuzma to carry the scoring load on the bench.
The increased number of injuries is starting the affect the team’s plans at the trade deadline. It’s no secret the Los Angeles Lakers want to clear cap space to make a run at a number of names in the upcoming 2018 free agency class, and it’s tough to deal players when you’re struggling to field a healthy, competitive roster.
The two Lakers that have been involved with trade talks most frequently are Clarkson and Julius Randle with hopes of netting expiring contracts in return. This means the Lakers will likely receive veteran players with no years left on their contracts that won’t improve the team.
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Some people would applaud this approach if the team were tanking for better draft positioning, but the Lakers don’t own the rights to their first round pick this season. However, if they did offload Clarkson and/or Randle and the injury problems persist, the Lakers immediately jump to the top of the worst teams (and most unwatchable) in the NBA.
My counter to this is to not try and trade both, but simply hold onto them through the end of the season and move them accordingly in the offseason. The Lakers can make these moves in the offseason while putting together a serviceable product on the court, an aspect that grows in difficulty if you trade two of your best, longest-tenured players.
Randle is much easier to move between the two, given his age, upside and contract situation. But there shouldn’t be a rush to deal him, especially if the Lakers can sign-and-trade him in the offseason and possibly net a better return.
Clarkson is similar, but the four-year, $50 million contract he signed in 2016 makes him tough to move with so many teams capped out for the season. Allowing teams to move cap in the offseason could open up the right trade for the Lakers, and wouldn’t come at the cost of watching their team plummet further.
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I’m open to trading players as long the roster is healthy, and the on-court product doesn’t fade too much with new players joining the mix. The Los Angeles Lakers are an underrated team with Lonzo Ball and the rest of the team healthy, so hopefully the team gets back to full health and remains patient with making roster moves.