Marcus Smart is set to join the Los Angeles Lakers after agreeing to a buyout with the Washington Wizards, and Lakers insider Jovan Buha thinks the former Defensive Player of the Year should replace forward Rui Hachimura in the team’s starting lineup in the coming 2025-26 season.
Hachimura averaged 13.1 points and 5.0 rebounds per game a season ago and started all but two of the 59 games he played in.
“In my opinion, it’s clear that Rui is the guy that should go to the bench because I think people tend to look at positions too much through an offensive lens and not a defensive lens,” Buha said.
He later went into more detail.
“I think that the move to me would clearly be to start Marcus Smart over Rui,” he said. “I think the one concern with that is just that Rui has tended to perform better as a starter than a bench player. But at the same time, I don’t think that the starting group as previously constructed was good enough defensively — was not even close to being good enough defensively.
“And that was my biggest concern with this group prior to the Marcus Smart signing. So, Rui’s gonna have to figure it out potentially as a bench player, or maybe they end up flipping him at some point and then he figures it out elsewhere. But I don’t think you should bend your starting lineup to your fifth-best player or sixth-best player, whatever, and kind of shape things around that.
“It needs to be what makes sense positionally, and it’s like ‘OK, LeBron [James], Luka [Doncic] and Austin [Reaves] are the three best players.’ Then, what are the two positions you need around that? You need a center, a rim runner, rim protector. OK, you got Deandre Ayton. Then, you need a versatile, switchable defensive piece — that’s Marcus Smart. So, to me, that’s the starting lineup that makes the most sense.”
One can argue that having James and Hachimura in the starting lineup is redundant from a defensive standpoint. Both players play the forward position and are best suited to defending forwards on the less glamorous end of the floor.
Hachimura doesn’t have the switchability on defense to shift onto smaller players, and James isn’t the versatile defender he once was earlier on in his career. Couple that with Doncic’s and Reaves’ clear weaknesses on that end, and starting Smart as a defensive safety blanket makes a lot of sense.
Smart is someone who has the versatility to defend players of all shapes and sizes. He will gladly accept a defensive assignment whether it’s a shifty guard or a bulky forward, and he’s used to taking on the toughest defensive matchup night in and night out.
The possibility of Hachimura being relegated to the bench maybe shouldn’t worry Lakers fans all that much, either. After all, he came off the pine in 29 of the 68 games he played in with the Lakers in the 2023-24 season and still had a very productive season. He averaged double digits in scoring and shot an impressive 42.2 percent from 3-point range on 3.4 attempts per contest.
Hopefully, the Lakers will at least experiment with having Smart in the starting five and Hachimura coming off the bench in the 2025-26 season.
It’s possible Smart’s presence in the opening lineup will prove to be just what the doctor ordered for the Lakers to contend in the West in the coming season.
