Larry Nance Jr. Discussion: Don't Fake The Funk On A Nance Dunk

Randle could be a Draymond type player as well. Mitch seems to be copying his mentor's game plan.

 

I said it in the Gameday Thread but one of the twitter heads posed it this way:

The Lakers couldn't find a trade they wanted for the #27, so they wanted a guy they felt would be worth at least two years on their roster. They went for the guy they liked a lot. If you HAVE to give out a guaranteed deal late in the 1st, you go get the guy you really want. Sure you can wait and try to buy into the 2nd round, but they were confident this way to get not only a guy they wanted in Nance Jr. BUT also a guy like Anthony Brown who they also liked in workouts.

 

Yep. Looking at the roster, they both have legit shots at making it with one of them likely a a healthy scratch or D-League. It is getting pretty crowded though. List of players we have drafted or returning:

Russell
Clarkson
J. Brown
Kobe
Swaggy
Randle
Black
Nance
Kelly
Sacre

That's ten guys with players like Brown and Upshaw lurking with non-guaranteed deals. Then there's the matter of a max or close to max free agent. So let's say we blow our entire load on 1 guy, we are at 11 people on the roster, possibly 13 if Upshaw and Brown make it leaving us only one roster spot (since Mitch never likes to carry the full 15 in case of an emergency).

I think we may be unloading Kelly somehow.

 

There's probably someone willing to let go of a 2nd rounder to get Kelly. He's shown some solid upside. Right now assuming we keep Brown, the roster is at:

Russell
Clarkson/J. Brown
Bryant/Young/A. Brown
Randle/Kelly/Nance Jr.
Black/Sacre

Mitch hinted heavily that we'd be going after a FA Center/Power Forward... We definitely have a lot of forwards now which I guess is cool. I hope they can contribute right away. Most people think we went after older guys because they'd be more likely to come in and just be able to contribute more or less day one.

 

Our roster kind of has a weird balance right now. Nance is being projected as a sf or pf for us. Not sure what we're doing up front. Right now we have Randle locked in at the 4 (most likely) with Black as our backup center and Lance and Kelly at backup pf. I think if we sign LMA or DeAndre, we will unload both Kelly AND Sacre somehow. Big man rotation that looks something like this?

Randle/Black/Nance
DeAndre/Black/Upshaw

Sort of roll with a 3 man big rotation with Upshaw and Nance filling in spot duty for fouls or injury.

 

I can dig that. I don't know about Tarik getting THAT many minutes though. I heard Mitch say he really wants to bring back Ed Davis still... I don't know how he plans on doing that, but that's what he said. I think the Lakers ideally go for something like

Randle/Black/Kelly/Nance
Jordan/Davis/Sacre/Upshaw

With one or two of those guys either moving out or just not playing much. I could see the Lakers putting Upshaw in the D-League to keep him honest even if he shines in Summer League.

 

Here's his dad winning a dunk contest just so you can see where our guy got his hops from:

 

I think an undrafted guy like Upshaw can be signed away from us, but honestly I'm not sure. I still think that's a route they go though because the buzz I'm hearing is most teams won't take a chance on this guy. The Lakers are hoping for the best but I heard that not a single team had him on their draft boards even as a late 2nd round buy-in type of guy. I mean obviously he didn't get drafted.

There's risk to losing the player if he gets signed to a 10-Day contract and the team loves him. I think that happened with Gerald Green a few years ago. The other side of the coin is that this kid has a lot of issues and if we're helping him through them, then we know more about him then everyone else does so we'd theoretically be giving him the call up before anyone else does.