Los Angeles Lakers select Rajon Rondo’s replacement in draft simulation

The Los Angeles Lakers might be looking at point guard in the 2020 NBA Draft.

While the 2020 NBA Draft has not officially been postponed yet, it seems to be a certainty that the league will postpone the draft to happen in the fall after the season wraps up in Orlando after resuming in July. On the bright side, it will give Los Angeles Lakers fans another sports-related thing to look forward to.

This draft is not overly important to the Los Angeles Lakers as they have their contending core in place. However, with all of the selections and pick swaps going to the New Orleans Pelicans as part of the Anthony Davis trade after 2020, the Lakers may look to take advantage of their first-round pick this year.

I would not rule out the team trading the pick, in fact, I think it is something that would actually benefit the team. However, we still have to prepare as if the Lakers are not going to trade the pick, and to do so, we are running various NBA Draft simulators.

Today, we ran Tankathon’s 2020 NBA Draft simulator to see who they think the Los Angeles Lakers will end up with. For consistencies sake, we ran the simulator 20 times to get a more concrete answer on who the Lakers may take.

The results were overwhelmingly towards one player.

With the 29th pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Lakers select Tre Jones, PG, Duke

Tre Jones was selected by the Lakers in 19 of the 20 simulations that we ran. The one exception was the team selecting power forward Patrick Williams as Jones went to the New York Knicks two picks earlier.

Jones would be an exciting selection and interesting addition to the Los Angeles Lakers. I do believe that he is someone who could make an impact right away for the Lakers, and if this selection was made, it would certainly spell the end of Rajon Rondo’s career with the Lakers.

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Jones is a two-way point guard by every sense of the word. While he is only six-foot-three, he is a textbook facilitator on the offensive end with great court vision that plays selflessly. Defensively, Jones is one of the best in college basketball in picking passing lanes and is a great on-ball defender because of his speed as well.

He might struggle a bit early on in his NBA carer against bigger and more physical point guards, such as Russell Westbrook, but he has the speed to keep up and defend anyone in the NBA, especially if he is coming off the bench and defending bench guards.

The one knock against Jones is the fact that he can be an inconsistent shooter at times but he did get better in year two with Duke, jumping from 26.2 percent to 36.1 percent from beyond the arc. Jones might not be the three-point shooting guard that typically plays alongside LeBron James but that is not what the team would even need him for.

Jones would fill in as the Lakers’ second ball-handler and faciliator behind LeBron. He would essentially take Rondo’s job and could arguably be more efficent early on than Rondo is right now. His defense would be better and giving a lesser workload would give more minutes to Alex Caruso, which is a positive.