2014 NBA Draft: Los Angeles Lakers believe they can find a good player with the seventh-overall pick

Although the Los Angeles Lakers obivously wanted to move up during Tuesday night’s 2014 NBA Draft Lottery and instead moved back a spot (they finished with the six-worst record will pick seventh in next month’s draft), general manager Mitch Kupchak believes they Lakers can still find a good player with that pick.

“I wouldn’t say it was bad luck,” Kupchak said during a conference call via Lakers.com. “We were hoping to get lucky, but as you know we could have dropped down to number nine, too. We were hoping to get lucky, or at worst case, stay where we were, but it could have been worse. As far as what [Boston Celtics Executive] Danny [Ainge] said, that’s up to him. We think drafting number seven, there is going to be a good player available there. Maybe Danny is talking more about a guy that changes the face of an organization from the get-go, but you can’t really evaluate these things until years later when you look back on it. Damian Lillard is a great example. I don’t think anybody thought walking through the draft that he would turn into the player [he is] as quickly as he did, but looking back on it is a heck of a selection. We will be able to get a good player, and we are hoping that three or four years from now we can look back on it and he is even a better player than we thought.”

The Lakers have recently been linked to former Kentucky Wildcats’ power forward Julius Randle, former Oklahoma State Cowboys’ point guard Marcus Smart and Croatian forward Dario Saric.