Lakers should bring in this EuroBasket semi-finalist
By Jason Reed
While Los Angeles Lakers basketball is still over a month away, basketball fans have had plenty to watch with EuroBasket 2022 going on. The FIBA event happens every four years and there are some prominent NBA players that are playing in the event.
The four teams in the finals are Germany, Spain, France and Poland. Poland is the only team in the final four that does not have a current NBA player as the other three teams all have multiple active NBA players.
Some of them are free agents that are still free to sign with another NBA team. The Lakers should be taking note of this as there is a player in the semi-finals that the team should be interested in bringing in before the 2022-23 season.
The Los Angeles Lakers should pursue Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot.
Luwawu-Cabarrot was the 24th overall pick in the 2016 NBA Draft and he has been a decent rotational player in the league thus far. He has never had that big of a role on any of his NBA teams but he has certainly showcased a skillset good enough to stay in an NBA rotation.
That has translated to EuroBasket as well. While Luwawu-Cabarrot has not been putting up incredible numbers, he has looked ahead of most of his competition thus far. That is no surprise when you are continually playing against the best basketball players in the world.
The one promising thing to take from Luwawu-Cabarrot’s EuroBasket showing is his three-point shooting. Luwawu-Cabarrot is shooting 43.8% from beyond the arc in the tournament, which is a promising sign. While he is a career 33% three-point shooter, he has had seasons where he shot as high as 38.8%.
Los Angeles does not need to outright sign him to a standard NBA contract to fill in one of the two remaining roster spots but they can, at the very least, extend him a training camp invite.
The Lakers are desperately thin when it comes to wings on the roster and Luwawu-Cabarrot would help some of those depth issues. The six-seven small forward has a seven-foot wingspan and has utilized that in the past to play quality NBA defense. If he can do that and hit down his shots, he has a chance to make the roster.
He also fits the youth narrative that the Lakers have been following this season as he is only 27 years old. There is something inside of Luwawu-Cabarrot that the Lakers could look to unlock, this is not the case of bringing in a grizzled veteran who is on the decline.
It is at least worth the experiment and Lakers fans should be tuning into the EuroBasket semi-finals to get a glimpse of Luwawu-Cabarrot themselves.