The Los Angeles Lakers could be in the market for some added backcourt depth, partly out of necessity, this summer.
Guard D’Angelo Russell, Austin Reaves, Dennis Schroder and Lonnie Walker IV will all be free agents, and chances are they won’t be able to keep all of them on new contracts. Therefore, they may look to the upcoming 2023 NBA Draft to find some reinforcements.
The Lakers have worked out quite a number of guards in advance of the draft, and they will have two chances to add talent there using the No. 17 and No. 47 picks. One intriguing player they recently brought in was Taevion Kinsey, a guard out of Marshall University in West Virginia.
A look at Kinsey
At 6-foot-5 and 185 pounds, Kinsey is a very capable scorer. He averaged 17.1 points a game over his five years at Marshall, and he topped out at 22.1 points a contest this past season.
He likes to attack off the dribble, and while he can get to the hoop and score, he does a lot of his damage in the mid-range area with his jumper.
Kinsey is a very efficient offensive player overall. He shot 50.7 percent over his five-year college tenure, and this past season he made an impressive 54.2 percent of his attempts.
He is a pretty good athlete who can jump, and he can also set up his teammates as a secondary facilitator. Kinsey put up 5.4 assists a contest this past season, which was up from 4.2 a game the previous year.
He gets to the free throw line a lot — he averaged 6.1 attempts per game in the 2022-23 season — but he isn’t great at converting there. He has a career mark of 73.2 percent from the charity stripe, which needs to improve.
Kinsey’s 3-point accuracy has fluctuated over the years from over 40 percent twice to as low as 18.3 percent in the 2021-22 campaign. He also averaged just 2.1 such attempts a game at Marshall, and it may be something that holds him back a bit at the next level.
He is expected to either go in the second round or become an undrafted free agent.
