Lakers news: Only one player stolen from the Los Angeles Lakers in 24 picks.
FanSided recently conducted an NBA expansion draft that featured two new teams joining the NBA. And in this hypothetical situation, we get great hypothetical Los Angeles Lakers news, as only one Laker was drafted among the 24 players in the expansion draft.
The two new teams that were added to the league for this experiment were the Kansas City Burnt Ends and the Seattle Sea Lions, both coming equipped with really cool logos and clean uniforms.
To conduct this fantasy draft, each NBA site expert in the FanSided network was approached and asked to protect three players on their respective rosters. We here at Lake Show Life decided to protect LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Danny Green.
It might seem like a shocker that we did not protect Kyle Kuzma but there is good reasoning behind our logic. First, Green is much more important to the Lakers winning a championship than Kuzma is and second, Kuzma is not even a long-term guaranteed asset for the team.
Kuzma is a restricted free agent after the 2020-21 season, so there are no guarantees that he will even be on the team in two years (think Julius Randle). If he had more guaranteed years under contract then he would have been considered more heavily over Green.
From there, FanSided editor Gerald Bourget (@GeraldBourget) and Hoops Habit site expert Duncan Smith (@DuncanSmithNBA) each drafted 12 players to their respective teams.
Only one player from the Los Angeles Lakers was selected in this expansion draft, and surprise surprise, it was not Kyle Kuzma.
Lakers news: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is drafted in FanSided’s expansion draft
You read that right: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was the only player from the Los Angeles Lakers that was selected in FanSided’s expansion draft. The same player that has been fighting off trade rumors for his entire Laker career.
KCP was selected with the 21st pick in the expansion draft and is headed to the Kansas City Burnt Ends. He was selected one pick after Gordan Hayward and one pick before Spencer Dinwiddie, which might be a bit of a surprise.
RELATED: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is better than you think
Personally, I would rather have both Hayward and Dinwiddie over KCP, but there still is some great value in KCP. He is a great three and D player who has shot the three-pointer exceptionally well (39.4 percent) this season.
It is a tad surprising that Kyle Kuzma did not get drafted but that just shows how deep the NBA is. Even if both teams made 30 selections, I do not think that Kuzma would have been picked. Some notable named that were not selected were Patrick Beverley, Nikola Vucevic, Eric Bledsoe, Al Horford and Andre Drummond.
Be sure to check out the entire expansion draft (linked in the first paragraph) to see how the Burnt Ends and Sea Lions turned out.