The injuries to Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves seemed like they’d end the Lakers’ season prematurely.
Marcus Smart and Luke Kennard had other ideas.
While LeBron James has temporarily returned as the head of the Lakers snake, he needed a few members of his supporting cast to step up in a big way. Smart and Kennard have answered the bell.
In the Lakers’ first-round series against the Houston Rockets, Smart averaged 14.7 points, 5.5 assists, 3.7 rebounds and 2.7 steals while shooting 46.4% overall and 44.8%
from deep. Kennard got off to a hot start in the series with 27 points on 9-of-13 shooting in Game 1 and 23 points on 8-of-13 shooting in Game 2, although he came crashing back to earth after that.
The emergence of Smart and Kennard is great news for a short-handed Lakers team that capped off an impressive series with a Game 6 win. Although Reaves returned ahead of Game 5, Dončić still remains without a timetable to return. Smart, in particular, should continue to play a critical role for the Lakers.
The timing couldn’t be better for Kennard or Smart, both of whom could become free agents this offseason. Kennard is finishing up a one-year, $11 million contract, while Smart has a $5.4 million player option for the 2026-27 season that he may be increasingly likely to decline with each passing game.
The question is whether the Lakers can retain either or both.
The path to re-signing Smart and Kennard
The Lakers are still in line to be one of only a few teams with significant salary-cap space this offseason, so they could just use some of that money to re-sign Kennard and Smart, provided the latter opts out. On Thursday, Jake Fischer of The Stein Line reported that “it is increasingly anticipated leaguewide” that the Lakers will want to re-sign Kennard.
Kennard will be a non-Bird free agent, but there are multiple pathways that the Lakers could explore to keep him in the fold in a nod to the role he has earned in purple and gold under fellow Duke alumnus JJ Redick.
Fischer didn’t expound upon what those multiple pathways might be. Allow us to hazard a guess.
The most straightforward way would be to just use some of their roughly $50 million of cap space to re-sign Kennard. The Lakers could offer him anything up to a max deal, although he isn’t likely to sniff anything close to that. Something around the $15 million non-taxpayer mid-level exception seems like a reasonable starting point in negotiations.
The Lakers could also sign Kennard with their MLE, although if/when they go the cap-space route this offseason, they’re only going to have the $9.4 million room mid-level exception at their disposal. If Kennard were willing to take that, they could renounce their rights to him to wipe his $13.2 million cap hold off their books, then re-sign him after they spent the rest of their cap room.
The Lakers are likely to do some cap-hold chicanery with Austin Reaves this summer, but that’s not in play for Kennard or Smart since they’d both be non-Bird free agents. If the Lakers want to re-sign either of them via non-Bird rights, they can offer no more than 120 percent of what they were previously earning as the starting salary of their new contract. Their cap hold is also 120 percent of their previous salary.
If the Lakers want to re-sign Kennard or Smart via non-Bird rights, they’ll have to keep their cap holds on their books heading into the offseason. (It’s $13.2 million for Kennard and roughly $6.2 million for Smart.) They can’t offer a starting salary higher than those cap holds without dipping into their cap space or MLE, though.
So, while the Lakers could have more than $50 million in cap space this offseason, Kennard and Smart already may have some of that money set aside for them. That could hurt the Lakers’ chances of landing another marquee free agent unless they’re able to salary-dump the two years and $25.7 million left on Jarred Vanderbilt’s contract.
The good news is that the Brooklyn Nets and Chicago Bulls are the only other two teams guaranteed to have cap space this summer. They might not face much competition for Kennard or Smart, particularly north of $15 million per year.
The bad news is that the NBA’s new anti-tanking proposal reduces the incentive for rebuilding teams to throw away a season before it even begins. Even though the Bulls are heading directly into a rebuild and the Nets are firmly in one, both still figure to pursue veterans in free agency who can help keep them out of the bottom three of the standings.
If the Lakers are somehow able to lure Jalen Duren or Walker Kessler in restricted free agency, they might not be able to squeeze either of them in while keeping Kennard’s cap hold on their books. Otherwise, they have clear paths to re-sign both Kennard and Smart whether via cap space, non-Bird rights or their MLE.
Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac and salary-cap information via RealGM.
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