Stanley Johnson’s 3-point efficiency proves Lakers are clueless

The Los Angeles Lakers have struggled this season due to several reasons. Losing Anthony Davis for a month-plus to a foot injury does not help and not having role players who can actually shoot the basketball is less than ideal as well.

To be fair, Los Angeles did not have many resources to improve the team last summer thanks to their previous mistake of trading for Russell Westbrook. But in classic Lakers fashion, the front office still did not maximize the resources it had and openly gave away promising talent.

One such example of this is Stanley Johnson, who showed some potential last season, earning a spot on the roster after signing a 10-day contract. For a team that desperately lacked wing depth, Johnson’s three and D potential at forward was exactly what LA needed to try and tap into.

So what did the team do? It traded Johnson away as a filler contract in the Talen Horton-Tucker trade. Johnson was eventually waived by the Utah Jazz and signed with the San Antonio Spurs, where he has been making the Lakers eat crow ever since.

The Los Angeles Lakers could use Stanley Johnson’s three-point shooting.

Stanley Johnson has been a marksman off the bench for the Spurs in the chances he has received this season. In 1.5 threes per game, Johnson is shooting 48.1% from beyond the arc. It is a small sample size and it won’t remain that high in the long term but there are very obvious improvements in his shooting stroke.

This is not an accident, either, as the writing was on the wall for Johnson to make this kind of improvement in shooting the basketball. Johnson worked with the same shooting coach that transformed Alex Caruso’s shot in the offseason. Surprise, surprise, he got better at shooting the basketball.

This is just another example that the Lakers do not know what they are doing. Every fan on the planet saw that this team did not have enough three-point shooting yet Rob Pelinka still strut out the roster with blind faith that every single one of his role players would have a career year from three.

But then in the same breath, he gives up on a promising young player who was working on his shot that was already in Los Angeles. That logic does not make sense regardless of how you try to interpret it.

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Stanley Johnson would not have been the difference between the Lakers being a contender and being who they are today. However, it is just another example of a larger problem that has put this organization in the position that it is in.