What’s next for Lakers? Team plans to add center, JJ Redick says they need to ‘get in championship shape’

A day after the Los Angeles Lakers‘ season ended, general manager Rob Pelinka and JJ Redick spoke to reporters about what went wrong and what comes next.

One big, glaring issue in their first-round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves: The Lakers, who went small for most of the series, were dominated on the boards by the team that employs Rudy Gobert. Go figure. Pelinka made it clear that they will add a playoff-caliber center to the roster next season, and Redick said that the way the season played out hasn’t changed his philosophy.

“I recognize the need for size, and certainly Gobert in Games 4 and 5 really hurt us on the offensive glass,” Redick told reporters. “But it is about, ‘What do you have in front of you?’ So I can have a philosophy, I can want to play up-tempo and move the ball side to side and run seven different actions on a different possession. Is that what’s best for my group? If the answer is no, then I’m not going to do that. So it is about just trying to figure out what’s best for the group.”

Both Pelinka and Redick reaffirmed the franchise’s commitment to a core of Luka Dončić, LeBron James and Austin Reaves. Redick said that the Lakers need to improve their conditioning next season, but praised the Wolves for outplaying them.

“Maybe this is hard sometimes for a coach or a player to admit this: We lost to a better team,” Redick said. “That’s just the reality. We did. And we put ourselves in a position to win Games 3, 4 and 5 and we weren’t able to do that in the fourth quarter. And that’s where I think you really have to evaluate and really try to grow from as a coach and certainly as a group, whatever that group looks like next year.”

A big change is coming

At the trade deadline, it appeared that Los Angeles’ front office had made a bold move to bolster its frontcourt. At a press conference on Feb. 6, Pelinka told reporters that he felt the team had found “the perfect guy” to fill its hole at center: Mark Williams.

The Lakers had agreed to send the Charlotte Hornets a 2030 first-round pick swap, an unprotected 2031 first-round pick, Dalton Knecht and Cam Reddish for the 23-year-old big man. It was a steep price to pay, but they saw it as “an opportunity to give [Dončić and James] all the resources they need to make a playoff run,” Pelinka told reporters back then. Two days later, the trade was rescinded. According to the Lakers, Williams had failed a physical. According to Williams’ agent, Jeff Schwartz — and Williams himself — he was healthy enough to play, so Los Angeles effectively backed out of the deal.

It’s unclear how Williams would have fared as Dončić’s primary pick-and-roll partner and the Lakers’ rim protector in a playoff series. Without him, though, Redick was left with a few imperfect options at center against Minnesota: Jaxson Hayes, Alex Len or no true 5 at all. Young bigs Christian Koloko and Trey Jemison couldn’t play in the playoffs because they’re on two-way contracts. Maxi Kleber, acquired in the Dončić deal, had foot surgery in late January and wasn’t cleared to play until Game 5. Redick was so desperate for frontcourt help that he threw Kleber out there for five minutes in an elimination game.

“When you make a seismic trade at the deadline, your roster and the building around it, it’s kind of like trying to build an airplane in the sky,” Pelinka told reporters Thursday. “And now we get a chance to sort of land that plane, put it in the hangar and really figure out the parts of it that we need to retrofit and change. And that’s what we’ll do.”

What’s next for Lakers? First-round exit starts clock on long-term plan after Luka Dončić trade

Pelinka said that the Lakers “know we have a lot of work to do on the roster” and addressing the center position will be “one of our primary goals” in the offseason. He said that this particular need has been “very clear” since the moment that they made the Dončić trade.

“That’s a very clear and obvious byproduct of trading potentially the best big in the league to Dallas to get a point guard,” Pelinka said. “Of course that’s going to open up a huge hole. And I said before: The trade deadline and the moments up to it don’t allow you the requisite time to explore every single unturned stone to add a big to our roster. We just didn’t have the time after the Luka trade. But now we do.” 

Pelinka said that he will be focused on “making sure that next year we have the requisite size to have a team to compete for a championship.” Given how Dereck Lively II and Daniel Gafford complemented Dončić with the Mavericks, it shouldn’t be surprising that Los Angeles would like to find someone like them.

“In terms of center traits, it would be great to have a center that was a vertical threat, lob threat and someone that could protect the interior defensively,” Pelinka said. “I think those would be keys. But there’s multiple different types of centers that can be very effective in the league. There’s also spread centers that can protect the rim. We’ll look at those as well. So I wouldn’t want to limit the archetype, but we know we need a big man.”

Committing to the core

In addition to wanting to size up, Pelinka expressed a desire to improve the defense on the wing. “That’s an essential need,” Pelinka told reporters. “We see it playing out in the playoffs, and anytime you can upgrade your defensive core on the perimeter, I think that’s gonna help.” If you’re busy constructing hypothetical trades involving Reaves, though, you might be wasting your time. 

“The level of confidence in Austin Reaves, LeBron James and Luka Dončić is at an all-time high still,” Pelinka said.

He added: “I think those three guys have incredible promise playing together, and we will collectively do a better job to make sure they’re surrounded with the right pieces to have ultimate success.”

Redick told reporters that the three Lakers’ three playmakers “will be communicating” in the offseason and the team would like to “get them together at some point for some sort of mini-camp.” Redick suggested that going through a full training camp with Dončić would help them in 2025-26.

“I think that’s sort of where you build a foundation and the building blocks for the rest of the year,” Redick said. “I think there’s value in repetition and frankly we didn’t get a ton of repetition and that’s the nature of making an in-season trade. But certainly feel very confident and very optimistic about those three going forward.”

Assuming James picks up his $52.6 million player option for next season or signs a new deal with a similar starting salary, Los Angeles will be over the luxury tax and less than $7 million from the first apron. It has some draft assets at its disposal, but it also has Dorian Finney-Smith‘s potential free agency (or potential extension) to worry about, so the front office will need to be creative to improve the roster around the edges. Pelinka did not sound too worried about any of this. 

“There was a lot of talk last year about the restrictions of the first apron and the second apron and there were people trying to forecast what the trade deadline might look like two months before,” Pelinka said. “The trade deadline came, and then all of us witnessed it was not only for the Lakers but for the league in general a huge and historic trade deadline. So I think the lessons of the system are there are still ways to transact, and I think this offseason, too, there’s gonna be a lot of movement around the NBA. It just feels that way.” 

Pelinka said that he anticipates that “there will be a lot of opportunities for us to look at,” since other teams will be aggressive in reshaping their respective rosters.

‘We have to get in championship shape’

The Lakers scored a total of 33 points in the fourth quarters of Games 1 and 5 against Minnesota and they were outscored by double digits in the fourth quarters of Games 3 and 4. It is fair to say that the Los Angeles wore down over the course of games and over the course of the series.

Is this because there roster just wasn’t deep enough? Was Redick crazy to make no substitutions in the second half of Game 4? Were the guys in the rotation out of shape?

Redick said that, when he thinks about how he wants the team to improve, it all starts with “the work that’s required in an offseason to be in championship shape.”

He continued: “We have a ways to go as a roster. And certainly there are individuals that were in phenomenal shape, there’s certainly other ones that could have been in better shape. That’s where my mind goes immediately: We have to get in championship shape.”

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Redick said that the player development coaches, performance staff and training staff would be involved in crafting offseason programs for each player over the next couple of weeks.

“We obviously recognize it’s a long season and some guys have routines and it’s not that we’re looking to completely break routines,” Redick said. “But we do want to have a program in place for each guy, so that when they come back in mid-August, September, we can build off of that and start training camp in a really good spot conditioning-wise.”

It is difficult to hear Redick say this without thinking about Dončić in light of the well-documented concerns that Dallas had about the superstar’s conditioning and durability. Redick did not say Dončić’s name in this context, but, separately, he recalled their first conversation after Dončić arrived in Los Angeles, in which Dončić said he wants to be coached and held accountable.

“I want to bring out the best version of Luka,” Redick said. “And that’s what he wants from me. And so that’s the partnership going forward, that’s the expectation and that’s sort of the baseline of what we’re trying to do. Let’s try to bring out the best version of Luka and hopefully win a championship doing that.”