DownSouthCrawfish’s Lakers @ Othello’s Warriors | 8:30 PM est | ABC

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There’s also a domino effect that comes with moving Davis to the 5. Playing small ball transforms their third-best scorer—Kyle Kuzma—from a luxury item into an invaluable piece. Kuzma has suffered the most in the Lakers’ new arrangement. There is no spot in the lineup for the third-year combo forward with LeBron at the 3, Davis at the 4, and either McGee or Howard at the 5. He has gone from starter to sixth man and is playing eight fewer minutes per game than last season.

Kuzma has been great in the rare times where he has, in fact, played with LeBron and Davis. The Lakers have an eye-popping net rating of plus-21 in 183 minutes with all three on the floor this season.

His reputation is a little skewed. Kuzma is a bigger celebrity than many more accomplished players because of where he plays, but he’s also better than he’s given credit for now that the backlash has swung things the other way. There aren’t many players with his size (6-foot-8 and 220 pounds) who possess his combination of athleticism, shooting, and ball skills.

Kuzma is a natural scorer. He doesn’t need to hold the ball for long. He moves well without it and he can put up points in a hurry. He’s third on the Lakers in points per touch (0.362) behind only Davis and Troy Daniels, a 3-point shooting specialist. He showed all the different ways he can score—pick-and-roll, posting up, spotting up, cutting to the rim, offensive rebounding, and getting to the line—when he dropped 36 points a win against the Thunder in January

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The Lakers have a five-man lineup that fits almost perfectly together in LeBron, Davis, Kuzma, and two three-and-D wings in Danny Green and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. They can run everything through LeBron and Davis, use Kuzma to fill in the blanks, and space the floor with Green and KCP. There aren’t many holes on either end of the floor. LeBron and Kuzma are their two worst defenders, and they are still huge forwards who can switch on screens and stay in front of smaller guards. That lineup has been dominant in the rare times when Vogel has gone to it, with a net rating of plus-25.6 in 42 minutes.

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