because Fisher has already the Lakers that he plans to play beyond this season. That still doesn’t mean the Lakers will resign him or keep him as a starter. Either way, there are some things that need to be mentioned:

Farmar is fast but not any better on defense.

S. Brown is fast and better defensively but still needs a lot of work.

Fisher’s value as a leader has always been under appreciated and not given enough credit.

He is the only player that kobe trusts as far as decision making.

No PG on the current roster has those charactersitics.

I think you meant “Buzzer.”

Fisher is a great and wise PG…He has been in the game a long time and his wisdom as well as his skill makes him a dominate player that stabilizes the laker team.. Lakers better never release him he will retire a Laker in a few years!

Decreasing his minutes sounds a lot better seeing as his presence in the locker room is extremely important.

Few teams can have an all-star at every position. I am sure if they had someone better than Fisher they would play him. But the young guys they do have are not yet up to the task.

You don’t seem like much of a Laker fan (your profile says you’re a Blazer lover – which is fine). But thanks for the concern and everything.

1) Why are you pretending to be a Laker fan?
2) No one here thinks of Fisher as an All-Star.
3) Fisher is exactly who he has always been…..a clutch role player.
4) APG means nothing in the Triangle.
5) Fisher is in great shape. His shortcomings have nothing to do with age. He simply looks worse because he is surrounded with better players now.

you clearly arent a laker fan. As long as derek fisher is hitting clutch shots in the post season i want him on my team.

The basic point is more or less valid, ‘cept he’s got a contract and he’s not retiring.

The timing is abysmal. THE SEASON IS JUST STARTING TONIGHT.

Sheesh.

or this:

fisher is on this team because he brings much needed veteran leadership to the others…
he may be getting old and he might not be able to keep up with chris paul and etc. but he still understands the team’s offense extremely well compared to farmar and brown, both who are not fully ready for a starting position…and as many have said, he still in solid shape and he has had very few run in’s with injury because of that…

a lot of folks might have agreed with him back in may (prior to the orlando series)
fish is definitely on the decline
still, he definitely does brings more intangibles than what the court shows.
they’ll definitely be cutting his minutes, though

and besides that he brings so much more to the team in veteran leadership along with the chemistry he has with Kobe.

Retire? No freakin way.

D-Fish is a stabilizing force to the offensive units and is teaching Jordan and Shannon to help further there progression into #1 grades in the NBA (Lakers, Spurs, Celtics). Look some day you guys might make it back to the real NBA, so maybe you should be worried about your Gangsters.

Besides Kobe, he’s the leader of this locker room, a stabilizing influence that Phil relies on to keep everyone in check. There’s a reason he was the one with the mic last night to unveil the championship banner instead of Kobe.

And besides that, he recorded a 12.15 PER last year. You could do hell of a lot worse for a PG that plays 20-25 minutes a night, and practically no one would bring the same intangibles that Fisher brings to this team. And while we’re on the subject of stats, FG% is deceptive because so many of his shots were threes and midrange jumps shots. Adjust for that accordingly, and his TS% was 54.6, a pretty solid number. And as practically everyone here will tell you, APG is meaningless in the triangle where Fisher is essentially a glorified two guard because Kobe initiates the offense so often.

The Lakers are the best Fisher can do, given the circumstances, and Fisher is the best the Lakers can do, given the circumstances. The former should be pretty obvious, given what our talent level is, and the latter is, well, it’s not as though there aren’t PGs that would fit in with the Lakers as well or better than Fisher does. We just can’t get them.

Of course, if we were talking about most other teams, Fisher would be a substantial liability. He can’t be a primary playmaker or a lockdown defender. But as other folks have noted, on the Lakers, he doesn’t need to be. Phil Jackson has done a fantastic job of setting his team up so that Fisher fits in as well as he possibly can.

When I heard he was returning to the Lakers—and as I recall this happened while there was still a possibility Kobe would still demand to leave the team—I felt that his addition was exactly what was needed to make sure Kobe would not leave. Whatever other faults he might have, Kobe has always repaid loyalty and dedication with the same, and you can’t deny that Fisher provides that in spades. That plus the fact that they came into the league together and that Fisher has provided some of the touchstone moments of the Lakers franchise made it inevitable (to me, at least) that Kobe would dig in for the long haul.

Even so, Fisher has outperformed the modest standards I had imagined for him. My hope and expectation is that his assets don’t depend very much on athleticism (which he never had much of anyway) and more on hustle and a cool head (despite the occasional PUJIT). This team needs someone who knows when not to just dump Kobe the ball and who also has the history with Kobe to say no to him. I’m not sure who else on the Lakers can replace that.

1) Derek was getting blitzed by smaller, faster guards during the Shaq years, so this is nothing new. What is new is the quantity of small, quick, quality PG’s in the league. It seems like he is getting slower because there are more guys blazing by him. 2) The Magic made lots of 3’s against everybody, so this point is moot. 3) Fisher has fewer opportunities due to the Lakers having more scoring options ahead of him (Kobe, Gasol, Bynum, Odom) than before (Shaq, Kobe). The real complaint should be how his 3-point average is dropping.

Until the Lakers have a reliable, competent replacement for Fish, lay off the "retire" angle. I’ll take the cagey veteran over the unpredictable rookie any day. As soon as Farmar or Brown is ready, Fish will step aside.

Get in the way? Isn’t it revealing that Kobe & Co. started getting back to the finals after the return of Fish? Wake up, man.