The Los Angeles Lakers are looking to add any help they can during the season in order to improve the team’s chances at winning the NBA Championship in 2022. While right now the Lakers might just be trying to add depth with the covid-19 surge in the league, adding a valuable rotation player for the playoffs would be huge.
Certain signings, such as Isaiah Thomas, is literally only for depth because of the covid-19 surge. While some want to see the Lakers bring Thomas in for the rest of the season, he does not really add anything new to LA.
Other signings could be with the playoffs in mind and one of those potential signings is Danuel House. House was recently released by the Houston Rockets, who converted Garrison Mathews to a four-year, $8 million NBA contract. Because of House’s status on the contending Rockets teams of the past, he has become someone who Laker fans want to see in LA.
However, Danuel House would not add anything to the Los Angeles Lakers.
I am all for the Los Angeles Lakers making additions if something does not work. However, the team has made it very clear that they are limiting their spending in some capacity because they are so high over the luxury-tax threshold. That is the entire reason why the Lakers signed Avery Bradley to a non-guaranteed contract: so they could release him without having to pay his full salary.
Bradley is the only player on the Lakers that the team can release without essentially adding an entirely new contract to the books and while he has not been great this season, the Lakers should not release him for Danuel House.
So the Lakers would have to release someone like Kent Bazemore in order to make space for House. And as bad as Bazemore has been, House simply is not good enough to warrant the luxury-tax payments that the team is obviously trying to avoid.
House was a valuable three-point shooter for the Houston Rockets when James Harden was in MVP form but since then, House has not done much of anything for Houston. Since the start of the 2019-20 season, House is shooting 35.4% from beyond the arc and 41.2% from the field.
House does not do anything else on offense other than shoot threes and he is not even doing that well. The last thing the Lakers need is another one-dimensional offensive player who is not even doing the one dimension that he is supposed to be good at.
House is not that good defensively, either. While he is not awful, he has been below average over the last couple of seasons and would not have a tangible impact on the Lakers’ perimeter defense. He would not be any better than someone like Bazemore, who we mentioned, was playing really poorly.
If this move was absolutely free then sure, why not. Bring him in for depth until a better option comes around. But because of the luxury-tax implications, and the team’s desire not to spend much, it is clear that Danuel House does not make much sense for the Los Angeles Lakers.