Getty Los Angeles Lakers General Manager Rob Pelinka sits with head coach Frank Vogel.
Nick Young has never been shy about his opinion and the ex-NBA guard offered the Los Angeles Lakers some advice. Young took to Twitter to urge the Lakers to add some more shooting to the roster.
“Lakers stop playing and go get some shooters make life easier,” Young tweeted on November 6.
The Lakers shooting woes date back to last season, but the team hoped to have addressed the issue this offseason. To their credit, the Lakers rank No. 10 from behind the arc shooting 35.4% so far this season. The Lakers have been much worse over the last three games shooting just 30% from long distance. Los Angeles is tied for No. 10 in overall field goal percentage at 46.1%.
Young played four seasons with the Lakers from 2013 to 2017. Was Young hinting at a potential return to the Lakers? Young shot 37.6% from behind the three-point line over his career, but his NBA days are likely behind him. The former Lakers guard last played for the Nuggets during the 2018-19 season.
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The Lakers Continue to Draw Criticism for Choosing Westbrook Over Hield
If the Lakers season does not turn around, many will point to the team’s decision to trade for Russell Westbrook rather than sharpshooter Buddy Hield as the moment that changed things. The Lakers were closing in on a trade with the Kings for Hield before pulling off a last-minute deal for Westbrook. NBA insider Marc Stein criticized the Lakers for choosing a flashy move over the team’s needs.
“As Yogi Berra might have observed: It sure feels like it’s getting late early for a franchise that, remember, backed out of the opportunity to address a well-chronicled void by acquiring the sharpshooting Buddy Hield from Sacramento in exchange for two of the players used to acquire Westbrook from Washington (Kyle Kuzma and Montrezl Harrell),” Stein noted on his website The Stein Line. “The Lakers chose instead to take a Hollywood swing for the fences by making the splashy (but risky) gamble on Russ.”
Los Angeles has plenty of viable excuses for their slow start including LeBron James and Anthony Davis being in and out of the lineup for the second straight season. Players have tried to squash the notion that this is impacting the team’s performance. Westbrook admitted that he is still adjusting to his new team.
“Yeah, I mean, just from my perspective, just probably just gotta play harder,” Westbrook explained after the Lakers’ loss to the Blazers. “Strictly just speaking for myself, do a better job just being me consistently and not confiding my game or how I play because it just doesn’t work for a team. It doesn’t work, just in general, just doesn’t put me in a position or a pace that I need to play at to be better [for] my teammate[s]. So, that’s just something I need to make sure I’m consistently doing.”
The Lakers Attempted to Add Shooters This Offseason
Heading into the season, Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka identified shooting as one of three areas the team hoped to improve upon. It will be interesting to see if the Lakers look to make any mid-season roster moves if the team’s struggles continue.
“I think going into the draft and free agency there were really three primary goals and objectives that we wanted to accomplish with the roster,” Pelinka explained during his September 23 press conference. “One was adding playmaking or a primary playmaker, two was shooting and then three was shifting back to, especially defensively, a model of sort of two rebounding defensive centers like we had when we won the championship in 2020, and those were the goals we had in mind. And I think if you look at the complexion of the roster, we feel like we addressed each of those three goals and that was something we set out to do, so we feel good about that.”