Can The Lakers Truly Count On Christian Wood This Season?

Your Los Angeles Lakers have enjoyed a quietly bountiful offseason, retaining almost all of their critical free agent pieces from the 2023-24 NBA season (aside from now-Toronto Raptors starting point guard Dennis Schroder), and making several smart signings.

A handful of players were added on minimum salary "prove-it" deals, including former lottery picks Cam Reddish and Jaxson Hayes.

Christian Wood, however, doesn't need to prove much on the court at this point. He, too, was inked to a veteran's minimum deal, but unlike Reddish and Hayes, he has proven pretty definitively that he belongs in the league. Whether it's as an empty-calorie scorer or something more, however, remains to be seen.

The veteran power forward/center can pour in points from basically anywhere, and has always been a solid rebounder in limited minutes. He's never been a consistent defender, but at 27 it's maybe unfair to expect that to change.

What he's never done much of at the NBA level is win. Across his seven seasons in the league, the 6'10" big man has played for seven teams, and he has yet to make the postseason once.

There are a handful of caveats to that statement, to be sure. Last year, his Dallas Mavericks blatantly tanked down the closing stretch of the year to miss the play-in cut (a top 10 seed in the West) in the hopes of holding onto their own top-10 protected lottery pick, which they did. He was on a competitive Milwaukee Bucks club (under future Lakers head coach Darvin Ham) at one point in 2018-19 that would eventually go to the Eastern Conference Finals, but he had been flipped to the New Orleans Pelicans (to play alongside future LA teammate Anthony Davis) before the playoffs started.

But Wood has not, to date, been on a postseason-qualifying roster. Barring a trade or some kind of disaster, that will change this year. The real question now is, how much of a positive impact will he have on a veteran-laden Lakers roster that's ready to win now? Wood has been rumored to be a bit of a locker room headache for prior teammates and coaches, but LeBron James has become an expert (for the most part) at navigating temperamental teammates over the last two decades.

Wood's shooting ability for his size makes him a unique asset for a Lakers team that is somewhat spacing-challenged in its frontcourt. For his career, he's a 37.9% shooter from deep on 3.5 tries a game. Last season, he made 37.6% of his 4.2 triple attempts. He clearly has the talent to make an outsized impact on this roster. But can he fall in line?

We'll see.