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The Los Angeles Lakers are going to spend the majority of training camp mixing and matching lineups to find the best combinations of players whose skillsets make sense around each other, and they’ll also watch Rajon Rondo play basketball.
Quite possibly the thing that makes fans most nervous right now (aside from injuries, obviously) is whether Frank Vogel and his coaching staff will bow to locker room politics and name Rondo the team’s starting point guard when they open the season in a couple weeks.
But there, through the darkness that is that timeline, shining like beacon of hope for anyone not all that interested in watching Rondo clog up the floor on offense and do the opposite of that on defense, is Avery Bradley.
Like it or not, locker room politics are a major factor in deciding players’ roles. If they didn’t, Alex Caruso wouldn’t be a cult hero who benefits from small sample sizes, but a cult hero fans actually know something about. In consecutive seasons, he’s watched Tyler Ennis and Rondo play ahead of him.
Honestly, Caruso is a better man than all of us for not having gone completely insane in that time.
Unlike Caruso (as frustrating as this is), Bradley does have some political swing thanks to his NBA resumé. It’s probably a helluva lot easier to convince guys like LeBron James and Anthony Davis that Bradley deserves to start over someone they respect as much as they do Rondo than it is to talk them into a relative unknown like Caruso, no matter how impressive the latter might be during training camp.
Pete and I start the show by discussing that, then segue over to a listener question about analytics (which morphs into a discussion about Kobe Bryant because of course) and finish with a couple more of our favorite stories to come out of camp thus far: Kyle Kuzma’s new shoe deal and his thoughts on SB 206.
You can listen to the entire episode below, and make sure to subscribe on iTunes, where you can also leave questions in the form of a five-star review to guarantee your topic makes the show.