Sources: Lakers 'stuck' waiting for Jarred Vanderbilt before resuming trade search

01/22/2025 04:54 PM

Cough if you’ve heard this before, but the Los Angeles Lakers are waiting for a player to come back from injury to evaluate their team. This time, it’s Jarred Vanderbilt, and according to sources around the league, it’s stalled out their efforts to improve the roster.

Vanderbilt joins a long line of Lakers whose return from injury was supposed to turn around a season. Trevor Ariza, Kendrick Nunn, Talen Horton-Tucker, Gabe Vincent, Christian Wood and perhaps some others make up this infamous list of role players whose health the season apparently hinged on.

After trading for Dorian Finney-Smith, there was initial optimism that Vanderbilt would return relatively soon. He has made a couple of trips down to the South Bay Lakers for some extra practice time, but continued ambiguity on that front has left the front office stuck in neutral since the Finney-Smith trade.

In their conversations with the Lakers, executives around the league have been met mostly with a front office staring at a fork in the road. It’s felt that way for years, too.

With some familiar tones coming from the front office, LeBron James and Anthony Davis are “concerned,” according to ESPN. James also has started his seemingly annual tradition of public comments questioning roster makeup.

First, when asked if there was a way to increase their margin for error internally (without a personnel move), James was blunt.

“No… that’s how our team is constructed. We don’t have much room for error,” James told reporters after the latest drubbing at the hands of the Los Angeles Clippers.

“We don’t have a choice, that’s the way our team in constructed. We have to. We have to play close to perfect basketball,” he reiterated, when asked about the toll playing in such a situation takes mentally.

Fortunately for James, Davis and countless Lakers fans driven insane by this cycle, Vanderbilt has been cleared to return to the court Saturday against the Golden State Warriors.

How will Lakers move forward with deadline looming?

Thing is: It shouldn’t take actually seeing Vanderbilt on the court to make decisions about the roster. Yes, having a decent data sample is ideal, but it doesn’t always work out that way. If anything, the larger sample size on Vanderbilt seems to be that you can’t rely on him staying healthy long enough for him to factor into personnel decisions.

Operating as the lead decision maker for any entity requires a level of forward-thinking and creativity utilizing the information one has, not the data they wish they could use. In this regard, according to several conversations with people around the league, the Lakers are severely lacking.

Of the frustrations those who would hope to work with the Lakers on trades point out, Los Angeles’ inability to think outside the box ranks near the top.

“We all wish we had all our guys all the time and could make decisions off of that,” a Western Conference executive told ClutchPoints. “At some point, you’re going to have to make a tough call without as much information as you’d like. Until they’re willing to do that, they’re stuck.”

With Vanderbilt returning Saturday, the Lakers will have just under two weeks to build a big enough data sample to make a decision. It’s still going to take more time for Vanderbilt start to look like himself. Optimistically, that might leave a couple games or so with which to make any decision at the deadline.

So, in waiting for Vanderbilt to return to fully evaluate the roster, the Lakers have all but wasted more than half of the season. This is exactly how Los Angeles remains as mediocre as it has been since winning the 2019-20 championship even with James extended his prime in ways we’ve never seen from a player his age.

At the very least, with Vanderbilt coming back, one of the key excuses to stand pat is being removed from the list of options for a Lakers front office under fire for its rudderless approach to the last couple of seasons. With James and Davis now getting restless, too, the next couple of weeks are going to be yet another fascinating watch.

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