Los Angeles Lakers: How to go about signing replacement players

The Los Angeles Lakers could sign replacement players once the season resumes if needed.

The Los Angeles Lakers‘ return to action is still a fluid situation that will continue to evolve over the coming days and weeks. What we do know so far is that the NBA plans on returning to action on July 31 at Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

The league will play eight “seeding games” to finish out the regular season to jump into the playoffs. Only 22 of the 30 teams in the league are going to be playing these seeding games, as teams had to be within six games of the eighth seed to be invited. Nine are from the Eastern Conference, 13 are from the West.

From there, it should be business as usual in terms of the playoffs, except for the fact that it will be played at neutral sites in Orlando Florida with no fans in attendance.

One thing that continues to be an evolving situation is the idea of replacement players if a team suffers an injury or if a player contracts COVID-19 during the resumed season.

ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the league is currently discussing how teams could utilize two-way contracts as well as signing replacement players. If a player does suffer an injury or contracts COVID-19, and is replaced by a replacement player, then that player could be ineligible to return for the rest of the season.

Wojnarowski also stated that replacement players would likely have to be signed to the NBA or G League or had been on training camp contracts this season. This limits older players who have not played this season as well as international players.

The exact execution of this plan is still unclear, but I have an idea.

Los Angeles Lakers: An idea for how to handle replacement players

The league needs to have a player outside of those already on the respective teams’ G League team as well as players who were on a roster but currently are not, such as Allen Crabbe. Teams should be able to pull from the other teams as well.

The idea is that the replacement players can come from the eight teams that did not make the cut. This includes the Golden State Warriors, Minnesota Timberwolves, Cleveland Cavaliers, Atlanta Hawks, Detroit Pistons, New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls and Charlotte Hornets.

However, they simply cannot be players that are on these rosters. We are not going to see Stephen Curry in Orlando. Instead, it can be players that are set to be unrestricted free agents after the season.

Their seasons are already over and the teams that they currently play for can still use things such as Bird Rights if needed in the offseason. The potential pool of replacement players from these eight teams would then be:

• Jeff Teague, Vince Carter, Treveon Graham, Bismack Biyombo, Willy Hernangomez, Tristan Thompson, Matthew Dellavedova, Ante Zizic, Brandon Knight, John Henson, Langston Galloway, Christian Wood, Evan Turner, Juan Hernangomez, Maurice Harkless

That is a pretty solid pool of players. Some of which would even be upgrades for teams as certain positions, so the league would have to counteract contending teams, such as the Los Angeles Lakers “losing” a backend rotation player to injury just so they could sign Christian Wood.

Thus, the league would have to set up a waiver system. Every three days or so could be the waiver deadline during the eight regular-season games and if a team had an injured player from those three days then they could make a claim.

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However, the claims should be ordered from worst to first, meaning that the Los Angeles Lakers would have the second-to-last position in the waiver order, which could help prevent teams from taking advantage of it.

In the playoffs, the waiver deadline could be after each round. Yes, this leaves open the possibility of someone being hurt in a playoff series and a team not being able to replace him right away but that is part of basketball.

If teams need immediate replacements during a series or in-between waiver deadlines then that is when they can pick from a collection of 4-5 G League Players that travels with the team just in case.

The other eight teams in the league could be opposed to this as it could give the teams a competitive advantage in signing those players in the offseason but the fact of the matter is that behind the scenes tampering goes on all the time and this would not really give any team much of an advantage.

But hey, this is just my personal idea. The league will definitely be releasing more and more details about the return to play in the coming days and weeks.