Lakers News: Los Angeles Fans Most Excited About This Summer Free Agent Signing
Your Los Angeles Lakers turned in a quietly excellent free agent run this past summer, as masterminded by team president Rob Pelinka.
LA re-signed perhaps its three most valuable free agents in starting point guard D'Angelo Russell, starting shooting guard Austin Reaves, and power forward Rui Hachimura.
The club also inked ex-Miami Heat point guard Gabe Vincent (who yours truly feels is just flat-out better than D-Lo and will eventually start), combo forwards Taurean Prince and Cam Reddish, and center Jaxson Hayes to team-friendly contracts.
The work is apparently not done, as LA reportedly intends to use its 14th roster spot on another backup big man.
Via our Twitter account, we polled our loyal readership about which of the four most exciting deals -- the Reaves and Hachimura re-signings and the Vincent and Prince additions (with apologies to Russell, as we believe he will soon become trade fodder) -- was the single-best of the Lakers' summer.
Overwhelmingly, albeit in an admittedly small sample size of polled fans, Austin Reaves ran away with it. The 6'5" swingman out of Oklahoma University inked an insanely reasonable four-year, $53.8 million contract with Los Angeles as a restricted free agent. 72.2% of our polled fans picked Reaves. The Vincent signing was the only other free agent move to finish with a double-digit percentage of fan votes, though it just barely hit that mark (11.1%).
After becoming the club's full-time starting two-guard near the end of the season, Reaves emerged as, by far, the third-best two-way threat on the roster, behind you-know-who.
In his 10 regular season games as a permanent starter, the 25-year-old averaged 18.3 points on .571/.486/.898 shooting splits, 6.1 assists and 3.3 rebounds in 34.4 minutes. Across 16 playoff contests, he averaged 16.9 points on a .464/.443/.895 slash line, 4.6 dimes, 4.4 boards and 0.6 steals a night. The best part is, he's probably still got room to grow.
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