The Los Angeles Lakers have a deep, polarizing roster. Of the many personalities that inhabit the team, which players will be the most valuable to the team in their quest to bring a championship to Los Angeles?
The Los Angeles Lakers will begin the 2018-2019 season as likely the league’s most improved team– and certainly the most interesting. Both of these titles will come to fruition thanks to the arrival of you know who.
Signing LeBron James unquestionably makes the Lakers the winners of the 2018 offseason, or so you would think. Apparently, it is not as unquestionable as one might believe. The free agent signings the team made after James were controversial, to say the least.
The arrival of players like Lance Stephenson and JaVale McGee have been the center of many fans’ critiques of the decisions made by the team’s front office.
The Lakers utterly failed this offseason despite signing the best player in the world, apparently.
While this is clearly an untrue and misguided opinion, there is some credence to the idea that the players the team chose to bring in won’t be the greatest fit. Problems arise when people fail to realize that these perceived “bad fits” will be nowhere near the most important pieces to the team next season.
Despite how some have chosen to portray the team, they will not be beginning the season with a Rajon Rondo/ Kentavious Caldwell-Pope /Lance Stephenson/ LeBron James/ JaVale McGee starting lineup. In fact, a majority of the veterans signed this summer will be backups to the team’s younger, more talented players.
It is obvious to anyone who follows the team that the Lakers still place a tremendous amount of value on their young talent– which is why they elected not to trade any of them for Kawhi Leonard. These players will be heavily relied upon in the coming season, despite the presence of their new veteran teammates.
But which of these young players will be the most valuable to the team? How exactly is the pecking order of which players will be most integral to the team’s success laid out?
These are questions that many fans seem to have completely wrong. So let’s fix that. Here are the full rankings of the team’s Non-LeBron James players based on who will be most valuable and essential to the team’s success in the upcoming season.