Nine New Lakers, Two Open Starting Jobs, and Two Preseason Games Left to Sort It Out

The Lakers have spent the last week discovering that a roster overhaul looks a lot cleaner on a whiteboard than it does in a box score.

Los Angeles opened camp on Sept. 30 with nine new players, and through the first two days head coach JJ Redick was talking up the competition for minutes. By mid-October, that competition has narrowed to a specific, unresolved question: who starts alongside Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves and Walker Kessler?

That's not a throwaway storyline. It's the last meaningful variable before the Lakers open the regular season at home against Golden State on Oct. 21 — the same Warriors team that just handed them a 101-89 preseason loss, holding Los Angeles to 13 points in the third quarter and 13 more in the fourth. A week earlier, a shorthanded Lakers group (no Dončić, no Reaves, no Kessler) was handled easily by Golden State as well.

The encouraging news is that the pieces are arriving. Reaves made his preseason debut against Sacramento on Oct. 9 and looked like himself — a reminder of how important he is after averaging 23.3 points, 5.5 assists and 4.7 rebounds in 51 games last season while shooting 48.9 percent from the floor. Kessler, the center acquired via sign-and-trade from Utah and the player Dončić said he "really wanted," was a full practice participant on Oct. 11 and closed in on his preseason debut. His last healthy sample — 14.4 points, 10.8 rebounds and 1.8 blocks in five games — is small but exactly the profile this roster lacked.

Dončić, meanwhile, remains the entire premise. He posted 33.5 points, 8.3 assists and 7.7 rebounds per game in 64 appearances last season, and the front office has openly staked the franchise's future on him. He also put his fingerprints on this roster construction, which raises the pressure rather than lowering it.

So what's actually at stake over the final two preseason games? Three things.

1. The fifth starter. With Dončić, Reaves and Kessler penciled in, two spots remain — and the decision likely hinges on whether Redick prioritizes spacing around Dončić or defensive cover for him. The Lakers brought in more shooting this summer specifically to unlock Dončić's interior game, so the tiebreaker may come down to which wing best compounds that.

2. Continuity. Only three returning rotation players plus a nine-man influx means the connective tissue — rotations, defensive communication, late-clock decision-making — is being built in real time. The ugly stretch against Golden State is the risk case: competent talent, broken sequencing.

3. The season-long picture. The market is treating this as a good-not-great team. BetMGM lists the Lakers' win total at 46.5 and their championship odds at 3500 (roughly a 2.8 percent implied probability). That's a notable step back from last season's 53-29 mark — a team that finished with a +1.8 point differential and squeezed out a 116.3 points-per-game offense while surrendering 114.6. The gaps between 53 wins and 46.5 wins are precisely the kind of margins that a muddled rotation can create or erase.

There's also the backdrop nobody in El Segundo can ignore. The franchise has been sold again — this time to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, barely a year after Mark Walter bought the team — and new ownership has reportedly floated a path toward a $30 billion valuation. Layoffs, price hikes and LeBron James' departure to Philadelphia all landed in the same summer. Dončić has handled the instability publicly as well as anyone could ask, but a head coach juggling a brand-new roster and a brand-new ownership group is a lot of moving parts for October.

None of this is fatal. Preseason results don't count, and the Lakers have two games and roughly a week to answer the only question that matters before Golden State arrives.

The roster isn't the problem. The order of it is.