Lakers newsletter: Jarred Vanderbilt is back, but will he help?

Hey everyone, I’m Dan Woike and welcome back to the Times’ Lakers Newsletter, where we’re marching toward trade season with the team about to get back(ish) an important(ish) rotation player ahead of a tough stretch of schedule.

This week, we’ll (AGAIN) talk about the deadline, this time through the lens of Jarred Vanderbilt, the Lakers owning who they are as the first step to recovery, and some final thoughts on an annual tradition I dread — the Grammys trip.

First things first

The big news around the Lakers this week is the scheduled return of Vanderbilt, the forward set to play for the first time in nearly 12 months after a foot injury suffered last February led to surgeries on both feet this summer and a lengthy return-to-play program.

Vanderbilt, who has been fully cleared, should be available Saturday night when the Lakers begin their Grammys trip in San Francisco against the Golden State Warriors.

“It’s been a long journey, tough process, but I’m excited just to be in the position I’m in right now,” Vanderbilt said Wednesday in his first interview since media day in late September.

Details around the injury still are scarce — and there still are some questions, namely about Rob Pelinka’s preseason claim that the Lakers had “a lot of optimism” that Vanderbilt would be playing “when the real games start.” Wednesday, Vanderbilt said the long recovery wasn’t any longer than he expected, though knee swelling in December briefly stalled his comeback.

Vanderbilt said his return was based on a number of factors, including him meeting certain benchmarks in testing more so than hitting any firm target dates.

If that sounds vague — well, it is. Vanderbilt didn’t really elaborate.

Regardless, the plan is to ease him back into the rotation, where the Lakers can deploy him as a versatile defensive weapon who can create offense by forcing turnovers and scoring off smartly timed cuts. And if he makes open threes, all the better.

Here’s the other thing — if the Lakers decide to be active at the trade deadline, it’s a pretty decent chance their wing depth will be changing. And, like we’ve detailed in this space repeatedly, the chances of the Lakers dealing Vanderbilt are severely hampered because of his injury history and the widely expected tax on including Vanderbilt in a deal.

Vanderbilt has three years remaining on his deal — the kind of long-term money that’s poison in trades. Multiple NBA executives believe the cost to include Vanderbilt in a trade is a first-round pick, meaning he’s far more valuable to the Lakers as a usable player than he would be as part of a trade in which they would have to add assets and essentially be overpaying for whatever they got back.

It’s hard to think he’ll be able to change that perception in a couple of weeks, the rust from being sidelined 11-plus months basically guaranteed to be an issue.

Margins

After the Lakers lost to the Clippers on Sunday, LeBron James and JJ Redick mentioned how slim their margins are, a sorta fancy way of saying the Lakers need to be closer to perfect than their opponents to win on most nights.

The comments weren’t surprising to anyone who has been around them the last three years — James has said this a lot — but with the trade deadline coming, the comments were amplified.

Like any problem, recognizing it is an important step to accepting it. Still, Redick sounded rightfully envious Wednesday when talking about the Boston Celtics’ style and the advantages great teams around the league create.

“There’s a reason those teams win as much as they do, because they create margins every night. And for us, a team that struggles to create margins at times, we’ve gotta be really cognizant of our turnovers,” Redick said. “We’ve gotta be cognizant of keeping them off the offensive glass. We’ve gotta be cognizant of us getting extra possessions on the offensive glass. We’ve gotta be great because they are elite starting quarters, finishing quarters. There’s eight segments of the game. [Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla] places an emphasis on that. That group has been together. They do a great job executing to begin quarters and to end quarters. And they, more often than not, win those margins.

“And so that’s not even including the disparity that will happen tomorrow in three-point shooting. So they’re gonna launch. And we have to do a good job of scoring at the rim and limiting our midrange and taking threes.”

Song of the week

“Fortunate” by Common and Pete Rock

I’m going to be listening to a ton of music over the next week or so as I bounce from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Charlotte to Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. to New York to Santa Ana. And it’s fitting because it’s the Grammys trip — the celebration of music that ruins my personal life at the end of every January. Almost nothing in my rotation is up for these awards, minus the latest Pearl Jam record and Common and Pete Rock’s EXCELLENT record that made me feel excited about hip-hop again.

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