The Los Angeles Lakers are down 3-1 to the Minnesota Timberwolves and have their backs against the wall. They'll need to win three straight games to survive, and will have to do it with a roster that is both flawed and exhausted.
JJ Redick made history in Game 3 by playing his second-half starters for 24 straight minutes to finish the game, the first coach to do that in the play-by-play era. It wasn't enough to get the Lakers a win, and now they're headed into a must-win Game 5 with a bench that nobody trusts and a core whose legs may have been pushed to the breaking point.
Remember, we're talking about a five-man lineup that relies heavily on 40-year-old LeBron James to play center, against a jumbo-sized opponent with Rudy Gobert, Naz Reid and Julius Randle in the frontcourt. LeBron has done an admirable job anchoring the defense, but the Lakers desperately need another big body they can rely on, someone who can battle those opposing bigs, crash the boards and control the paint on defense.
The Lakers need someone like Ivica Zubac
Ivica Zubac, the 28-year-old Clippers big man, has quietly been an enormous difference-maker for the Clippers over the past few years. And these playoffs have been a bit of a coming-out party for him.
According to the NBA's player-tracking stats, no one has been a more effective rim protector in these playoffs, and he's done a terrific job making things difficult for Nikola Jokić — who is shooting just 56.9 percent on 2-pointers through four games, down from 62.7 percent in the regular season. Zubac is averaging 18.8 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game in this series, with an incredible 5.0 offensive rebounds per game.
He's basically a perfect fit for the massive hole in the Lakers' frontcourt ... and he's also a former Laker.
Zubac was taken by the Lakers with the No. 32 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft and spent the first two-plus seasons of his career there. To be fair, he was just 21-years-old and a project when the Lakers traded him. But he had flashed clear potential and the return they got for him was embarrassingly paltry.
The Lakers traded Zubac and Michael Beasley to the Clippers for Mike Muscala at the 2019 NBA Trade deadline. At that point, the Lakers were in their first season with LeBron, one game over 0.500 and locked into a battle to make the playoffs. They went 9-18 after the trade and ultimately missed the postseason. Muscala appeared in 17 games, doing nothing of note, before signing with the Thunder in the offseason, leaving the Lakers with nothing left from the trade.
Even if the Lakers had held onto Zubac, he might not still be on the roster. He's signed three contracts with the Clippers since he was traded, and his current deal — three-year, $58 million, signed last summer — would have been tough for the Lakers to fit into the rest of this roster. But it's never a good move to give away a youthful asset for nothing of lasting value. And in this case, given the Lakers' struggles and Zubac's emergence, it's understandable that fans would feel let down.