The are signing veteran forward , . It’s a sensible, low-risk signing for a team with the specific limitations that the Lakers are dealing with. Thybulle is a two-time All-Defense choice for a roster without the resources to add much perimeter defense following its sign-and-trade splurge on . He has shot far better from deep with the than he did with the , so if he can stay healthy, the Lakers may have just found a bargain on the wing. They’ll have to hit on a signing or two like that in order to cobble together a viable defense.
But the Thybulle addition has implications beyond simply the Laker wing rotation. The deal takes the Laker roster to 16 players. This isn’t a problem quite yet. The offseason roster maximum is 21, so the Lakers are fine on that front. But by the beginning of the season, they’ll have to trim that figure down to 15. All 15 of the players that preceded Thybulle on the roster had guaranteed contracts, as does Thybulle. The Lakers could afford to waive a guaranteed salary, but few teams are ever eager to do so. More likely, there’s a trade coming.
As of right now, the Lakers have seven trade-eligible players. I think we can state pretty confidently that Luka Dončić will not be traded to address a roster crunch. has a negative contract, so the Lakers would have to attach draft capital to move him. , and are all reasonable candidates, and while Hardy cannot currently have his salary aggregates, Knecht and LaRavia could, so the Lakers could combine them to pursue an even more expensive player. impressed at Summer League, so odds are, the Lakers would prefer to keep him as a developmental project.
Our last candidate has the most famous name of the bunch: . His father, , is obviously still a free agent. At least five teams are still openly pursuing him: the , , Philadelphia 76ers, and . Until the elder James signs, there will be assumptions that his son and former teammate eventually follows him to his next destination.
Is that a guarantee? No. has previously reported that a father-and-son reunion is not guaranteed next season. But no reporting has explicitly ruled that out either, and there’s a pretty straightforward argument that he is the most expendable player on the Lakers roster.
As disappointing as Knecht has been as a No. 17 overall pick, he’s played far more at the level than Bronny has, and prior to his failed trade to Charlotte, looked a good deal better. Thiero hasn’t played much, but was a higher draft pick one year later and has better physical tools. LaRavia is a proven, NBA-caliber rotation player. If the Lakers could move Vanderbilt, they’d probably prefer to, but that almost certainly would involve attaching some of their very few remaining draft assets. Hardy would be the other obvious candidate as a scoring guard on a team full of scoring guards, but it’s almost always easier to move a minimum-salary player like James than a $6 million player like Hardy.
There are a number of different pathways the Lakers could take to trim the roster down to 15, and they have months to figure that out. But the fundamental question here is how much the Lakers value the younger James without the elder one in the building. Bronny did get real rotation minutes in the playoffs, something that neither Knecht nor Thiero did, but those minutes were still based on all of the injuries the Lakers were fighting through at the time. He has real defensive upside despite tools far more limited than his father’s, but he has still shown nothing yet offensively that suggests he’ll ever be a plus on that end of the floor. Do the Lakers think of him as a real prospect, or was he the price of employing his more accomplished father?
We’re about to find out. One way or another, the Lakers are going to trim their roster. If James sticks around while another player moves, that presumably answers that question. If the Lakers are willing to ship him off to his dad’s next team just to clear that spot, well, that would give us a different sort of answer. Either way, the Thybulle signing put a bit of a spotlight on the James situation in Los Angeles. They now have to do something, and whatever that something is, it will give us some clarity on what the next stage of Bronny’s career will look like,
