Los Angeles Lakers: Ranking each role player by importance
By Jason Reed
Role players can be just as important to a title-contending team as the star players and the Los Angeles Lakers have a deep roster full of role players.
The Los Angeles Lakers‘ ideal summer consisted of not only trading for Anthony Davis but also signing Kawhi Leonard. The team was able to clear up enough cap space for Leonard and played the waiting game for Leonard to make his decision.
After over a week of waiting, Leonard decided to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers instead as they were able to work out a deal for Paul George, giving Leonard a star to contend with.
As soon as that news broke the Los Angeles Lakers made a frenzy of moves, bringing in role players to help fill out the roster. Some of the role players were on last year’s team, some were new faces.
All in all, the Lakers have built a roster that is definitely deep enough to contend for an NBA Title as well as get through the grind that is an 82-game NBA season. Even losing DeMarcus Cousins to an ACL injury didn’t derail the Lakers, as they replaced him with former laker, Dwight Howard.
There undoubtedly is a fall off there, but Howard still has a lot to offer to an NBA team, as long as he can keep his off-court antics in check.
For the sake of this article, we are defining the role players as anyone not named LeBron James, Anthony Davis or Kyle Kuzma. You certainly could make the case for Kuzma being a role player, but the Lakers specifically wanted to hold on to him in the Davis trade talks.
For that reason, we will include him in the Lakers’ “big three,” although there is a drop-off from LeBron and Davis to Kuzma. Also, we are limiting this to 10 guys, as a roster can only have 13 active players. So sorry, Talen Horton-Tucker, you won’t make this list.