The Lakers beat the Clippers 99-85 on Tuesday night at Thomas & Mack Center to move to 3-0 in Las Vegas, and the loudest ovations of the week once again belonged to a player who never checked into the game.
Robbie Avila, the goggled big man who arrived in Los Angeles as the most nicknamed player in the 2026 draft class, was a DNP-CD against the Clippers.
The timing gave the night an extra layer. Hours before tipoff, Khobi Price of the California Post published a feature on Avila that captured just how thoroughly Las Vegas has adopted him — and how little of him it has actually been allowed to see.
Vegas has adopted Robbie Avila, even when he doesn’t play
Fans at Thomas & Mack broke into chants of “We Want Rob-bie!” during the second half of Friday’s game against the Thunder, then escalated things on Saturday against the Mavericks by booing whenever a Lakers substitute who wasn’t Avila entered the game. The scene grew loud enough that the arena’s public-address announcer began encouraging the chants himself.
The subject of all that noise has appeared in exactly one of the Lakers’ six Summer League games. Avila started the July 6 California Classic win over the Spurs and finished with two points on 1-of-6 shooting, two assists and one rebound in 14 minutes, and he has watched from the bench ever since.
Avila told the California Post he hears every bit of it.
“It’s a little bit of motivation because right now I’m not on the court,” Avila said.
The fascination did not start in Vegas. Avila accumulated a small library of aliases in college — Cream Abdul-Jabbar, popularized by Kentucky Sports Radio’s Matt Jones in 2024 as a nod to the protective goggles Avila shares with the Lakers legend, remains the most famous, though Avila told Price his personal favorite is Rob Wave, a riff on his favorite rapper, Rod Wave.
The cult following is built on a real resume
It would be easy to file Avila under novelty act, and it would be wrong. The Associated Press profiled him during March Madness as the engine of a Saint Louis team that won a school-record 29 games, noting that the 6-foot-10, 240-pound center from suburban Chicago was the Atlantic 10 Player of the Year, led the Billikens in both scoring and assists and entered the tournament ranked third among NCAA centers with 211 career 3-pointers.
He put up 12 points, five rebounds and five assists in Saint Louis’ 102-77 first-round rout of Georgia before the Billikens ran into top-seeded Michigan. The backstory reads like it was written for a Lakers audience.
Avila finished as the career scoring leader at Oak Forest High School outside Chicago, spent two seasons at Indiana State — where he anchored a 32-7 team that reached the NIT championship game — and then followed coach Josh Schertz to Saint Louis, turning down richer offers elsewhere to do it, per the AP.
“Winning has followed him everywhere,” Schertz said. “It’s not a coincidence.”
The goggles, for what it’s worth, are not a costume. The AP recounted that when Avila considered switching to contacts in high school, his brother talked him out of it, and the eyewear has been part of the package ever since — enough so that a kid in Buffalo asked a team official for the goggles off his face after the Georgia game.
None of it was enough to get him drafted. Avila went unselected in June, and the Lakers signed him to an Exhibit 10 contract — a non-guaranteed deal that gets him a Summer League and training camp audition and, if he does not crack the NBA roster, gives him a financial incentive to spend the season with the Lakers’ G League affiliate.
The math between the chants and the minutes
That contract is the honest lens for the DNPs, because the minutes crunch is structural rather than personal. The Lakers’ summer staff is evaluating its actual investments first — first-round pick Cameron Carr, who scored 23 points on Tuesday, and the two-way and standard-roster young players ahead of Avila in the pecking order — and the big-league roster Avila is nominally auditioning for is already full.
Read that way, an Exhibit 10 player getting one start and a pile of DNPs on a 3-0 team is not a snub so much as a queue, and the queue can still move. The realistic prize for Avila this summer was never a standard contract but a two-way conversion or a featured role in South Bay, where a 6-foot-10 passing hub who shoots it would be the kind of developmental centerpiece that franchise has historically done well with.
The crowd reaction is not nothing in that calculus either, because organizations notice when an end-of-bench signing becomes the most marketable player in the gym. Avila, for his part, is framing the wait the way coaches hope a camp invite will.
He is focused on learning and being a good teammate while pushing for whatever opportunity comes, and the schedule still offers one: The Lakers had at least two more Las Vegas games in front of them after Tuesday, with an unbeaten record that has them pointed toward the tournament rounds. If the games get decided early the way Tuesday’s did, the chants are going to start again, and at some point the easiest way to quiet a Vegas crowd is to give it what it wants.
