Tony Bennett And 2026 Draft Discussion

I've been thinking about this a lot the past several days and have been looking more closely into this year's projected Mid-to-Late First Round players- and I think there's a potential path here for the Lakers to get creative and be a bit aggressive in the draft this year.

As previously discussed, there's several potential Centers in that range who could be smart pickups for the Lakers to pursue, most notably Motiejus Krivas and Aday Mara IMO. And while Krivas is very clearly the more immediately "NBA ready" player of the two, I do think Mara could still be a good get for the Lakers long term and would work fine if we do "Center by Committee" for the first couple of seasons.

More importantly though is the three-headed dragon of a frontcourt that Mara is a part of at Michigan this year, alongside combo forward Yaxel Lendeborg and forward-center Morez Johnson Jr. I think there's a way for the Lakers to at least get one more First for this year's draft class on Draft Night, maybe two if we're really lucky, and walk out of the First Round Draft Night with one of either Krivas or Mara and either Yaxel or Morez, as the Lakers' long term starting frontcourt to pair up alongside Luka and Austin.

Notably if the Lakers were able to draft Krivas and Morez, that duo would be monstrous. Reminiscent a bit IMO of playing AD at the 4 and Dwight+McGee at the 5 during the Bubble Ring run in 2020.

Essentially, what we could do on Draft Night is agree to a trade with Denver to take on Cam Johnson's contract into our cap space to enable them to resign Peyton Watson unperturbed, in exchange for their '26 First pick. That way, we'd be able to draft two potential longterm frontcourt pieces, have Cam as a bench piece and still have plenty of cap space left over to go do a S&T with Houston for Tari Eason after the fact.