Nick Young campaigns for Lakers to sign him in SportsCenter Instagram comments

The Los Angeles Lakers spent Monday working out and meeting with free agent guards J.R. Smith and Dion Waiters, leading to tons of speculation about who the team will ultimately sign.

The SportsCenter Instagram page decided to get in on the fun, and asked fans to vote for which option the Lakers should go with. The comments included a surprise cameo from former Lakers guard and current free agent, Nick Young:

Young’s most recent NBA stint was the four games he played for the Denver Nuggets last season after being signed for the rest of the year and then waived after just 20 days with the team.

In his last full NBA season (2017-18), Young shot 37.7% from deep during the regular season for the Golden State Warriors before cratering to 29.8% in the playoffs and playing sparingly in the NBA Finals.

Young is currently hosting a podcast with Los Angeles Sparks forward Chiney Ogwumike, and as of October had said he’d retire after this year if no team signed him.

If he wasn’t joking around (which is always possible, this is — somehow unsurprisingly — not the first time Young has publicly campaigned to rejoin his hometown Lakers. Before Young signed with the Nuggets last year, he sent (and later deleted) a tweet implying that the Lakers should sign him as the team was particularly cold from deep during a loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.

The Lakers didn’t take a look at him then, but could Young actually help them now? It seems unlikely, given how he went out with both the Warriors and Nuggets. And based on him not being connected to the Lakers by any reporting prior to this Instagram comment, it seems somewhat unlikely they’ll even give him a serious look.

Still, this front office does seem to love a good redemption story, so maybe Young will be their latest attempt to bring in a former castoff to help them win. Until he’s actually connected to the team, though, it may be safer to look at this comment more like this:

Harrison Faigen / Silver Screen and Roll

Hopefully everything above is wrong though, because I think we can all agree that Nick Young coming in ready to play and hitting key threes to win the Lakers a title would be an incredible turn of events.

For more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts. You can follow Harrison on Twitter at @hmfaigen.