The Los Angeles Lakers spent the offseason collecting rotation players, and the bill for that depth comes due before opening night. As of late July, the roster carries 16 players on standard contracts, one more than league rules allow entering the regular season, which means the front office must trade or waive somebody before the games count.
Two-way players Chris Manon, Arthur Kaluma and AK Okereke sit outside that limit, so the squeeze lands entirely on the standard roster.
That math collided this week with a blunt assessment from the most plugged-in voice covering the team. On the latest episode of his podcast, which he posted Wednesday, Jovan Buha of Buha’s Block walked through the roster with guests Trevor Lane and Iztok Franko and landed on a conclusion that reframes the whole depth chart.
“They only have three guys that are clear-cut, no-brainer starters,” Buha said.
The three are Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves and Walker Kessler. Everything beneath them is a competition — and that includes Quentin Grimes, who has been broadly penciled in as the fourth starter all summer but whom Buha grouped with the roster’s bench-caliber pieces rather than its locks.
The fifth-starter question has dominated Lakers coverage for a month, and this site has already made the case for how that race shakes out. What the new episode adds is different: a map of everything underneath the starting five, where 16 players are fighting over 15 contracts, roughly 10 rotation spots and a finite pile of minutes.
Three locks, one presumption and a job opening
There are six internal candidates for the open starting job on the wing: Ziaire Williams, Matisse Thybulle, Adou Thiero, Cameron Carr, Jake LaRavia and Sandro Mamukelashvili. His skepticism was not about any one player but about the category, because each of the six has spent his career as a complementary or bench piece, and the Lakers are asking at least one of them to become a reliable starter on a team with second-round-and-beyond ambitions.
Per Buha’s own rundown of the topics, the conversation moved from the starting question into who makes a 10- or 11-man rotation, how the minutes distribute and where playing time comes from for Carr and Thiero. Those are depth-chart questions, not starting-lineup questions, and they are the ones training camp will actually answer in September.
The rebounding wrinkle nobody else is talking about
Buha added a detail on Friday morning that sharpens the criteria for the open job. Responding to a listener on X, he flagged the glass as a quiet structural problem for the projected group.
“I don’t want him as the third-best rebounder in a lineup,” Buha wrote of Reaves, pointing to matchups with Oklahoma City, San Antonio and New York.
I don't think it's a *major* issue, but it's still an issue, IMO. Austin is above average for a guard, but I don't want him as the third-best rebounder in a lineup against OKC, SAS, NYK, etc. (or Grimes, if you want to argue for him). I think they need someone to nudge him down…
— Jovan Buha (@jovanbuha) August 7, 2026
The numbers frame the point. Reaves averaged a career-best 23.3 points, 4.7 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game across 51 appearances last season, and that rebounding figure is genuinely solid for a guard. However, it should be the fourth-best number in the starting lineup, not the third, because a frontline of Kessler plus one more legitimate rebounder keeps Reaves out of traffic against the biggest lineups in the West.
Read that way, the reply quietly reorders the candidate list. It strengthens the case for Williams’s and Thiero’s size and LaRavia’s board work, and it weakens any configuration that treats the fifth spot as another perimeter shooter.
The 10- and 11-man math
Franko, who joined the episode as a guest, published his own rotation conclusions afterward, and they sketch the bench structure as clearly as anything available in early August.
“I leaned toward Williams because of his length, athleticism, and ability to cover space,” Franko wrote at his digginbasketball newsletter.
His full chart slots Mamukelashvili as the first big off the bench in the role he thrived in with Toronto, treats Thybulle as a player whose minutes need managing given his injury history rather than an every-night starter, and frames Williams and LaRavia — the two former Memphis teammates — as the most logical finalists for the open job.
Add Collin Sexton as the primary bench scorer and Kevon Looney as the veteran backup center behind Kessler, and nine rotation places fill up fast. That is precisely the crunch Buha’s episode circled for the young players.
If the wing job goes to a veteran, Carr and Thiero are competing for whatever sits at the back of a 10- or 11-man rotation, and the difference between those two numbers may decide whether either rookie-scale player sees consistent floor time before injuries intervene.
Jaden Hardy, Dalton Knecht, Jarred Vanderbilt and Bronny James occupy the same contested territory, which is a long list of names for what may be two jerseys’ worth of minutes.
The 16-to-15 decision
The roster count turns that minutes competition into an employment competition. Somebody on a standard contract does not make opening night, and the candidates for that decision overlap almost perfectly with the back of the rotation.
The front office’s month-long pursuit of an external forward hangs over the whole exercise, because any trade that lands a starter likely sends out multiple roster players and solves the numbers problem in the same transaction.
ESPN reported this week that the Jonathan Kuminga pursuit has gone weeks without progress, and the rest of the shrinking market offers no obvious upgrade on the players already in the building. The likeliest outcome, for now, is that the depth chart resolves itself internally.
That resolution starts sooner than the calendar suggests. The roster convenes in Slovenia later this month for Doncic’s team minicamp, the schedule release will fix the season’s shape shortly after, and training camp in late September becomes the actual tribunal for every question the podcast raised. The Lakers built a roster with more capable players than jobs, which is a better problem than the alternative and a real problem all the same.
For the first time in years, the most consequential Lakers decisions of October will be made at the bottom of the depth chart rather than the top of it.
