Anthony Bennett will play in purple and gold for the next four seasons
It's been a rough free agency for the Los Angeles Lakers. They once again failed to secure their most coveted RFA - shades of Greg Monroe all over again - and were persistently rebuffed by all their secondary targets. But all is not completely lost, as the team tapped former #1 pick Anthony Bennett with a 4 year deal that will pay him $1.5 million a season to be the team's backup PF. They also submitted currently leading bids on Rudy Gobert and Eric Maynor.
GM Jestor's ties to UNLV are well-known, and the picture above are from AB15's summer league after his rookie season, where, reported Jestor, "He looked much quicker and much improved with his lost weight." That emphasis on nutrition and weight control will carry over to this offseason, where the Lakers will put him on a regimen designed to trim him further down from 240 to 230, in order to enhance his quickness and athleticism.
Bennett was criticized by many, including Jestor, for coming out too soon after a single year with the Runnin' Rebels, in order to take advantage of one of the weakest classes in professional basketball history and be drafted 1st overall. As the GM observed, "When I saw him play at UNLV, he had these flashes of dominance that just made you say wow, but it was also clear that he was raw. Really raw. Of course, Dave Rice was shit at developing players, so maybe it wouldn't have made much of a difference in the end, but he definitely declared too soon from a basketball development standpoint. Financially, it made perfect sense, however."
And yet, despite the riches of #1, Bennett's greenness clearly showed in Cleveland, even if he did win the 2013 Slam Dunk contest. And still, the allure of being the 1st overall pick shines on. In Orlando, in Golden State he consistently averaged 20 minutes a game, great patience shown while the Magic and Warriors waited for him to develop. Although he never came close to being worthy of his slot, and never will, he moves on to Los Angeles to continue his career.
As noted, the Lakers will give him weight training and a run during preseason as one of the backup PFs. In the current thinking of new head coach Terry Stotts, star DeMar DeRozan will play the backup minutes at SF, leaving open more minutes at PF to divide between AB15, Aaron White, Cliff Alexander, and Cristiano Felicio, with some minutes at C also going to the latter 3. If the team's bid for Gobert is successful, he'll be inserted as the starting center, letting White, Alexander, Felicio, and Arturas Gudaitis to fight it out for the reserve spots there, with White having the inside track.
Should Bennett struggle, he'll find himself dropped to the third string while the Lakers focus on fixing the mechanics of Gobert, DeRozan, and Giannis "The Greek Freak" Antetokounmpo. Regardless of what happens however, it's clear that the Purple and Gold are going back to the old Jestorball ways of recruiting high IQ players (see: Nik Stauskas, Bennett, the pursuit of Gobert), developing basketball intelligence as part of the team identity.
