Luol Deng still hasn’t played since opening night for the Los Angeles Lakers, and now that the trade deadline has come and gone, it seems he’ll be trapped on the bench until the end of the season.
It’s been a tough year for Deng, who will make more than $17 million this season yet has played a scant 13 minutes and has one basket on the season. Deng signed a four-year, $72 million contract with the Lakers in 2016 but almost immediately fell out of favor with new Lakers management, putting him in a unique kind of purgatory.
The team doesn’t want the 32-year-old, and they seem unable to trade him and get his salary off the books. So, on the bench he sits while young players take up minutes, and the team tries to look forward to a future that clearly doesn’t include Deng.
The Los Angeles Times‘ Bill Plashke wrote a feature about Deng on Wednesday that chronicled this season of inactivity and just what Deng has been doing while not playing. The veteran swingman was surprisingly honest about his frustrations with it all.
“It sucks,” Deng said. “It’s hard.”
Trying to understand the fallout of what exactly happened has been tough for him as well.
“I’ve never before seen a guy brought over to make a change, but then there was a different change,” Deng said. “I had no idea I wasn’t going to be part of the plan.”
Last February, five days after Jim Buss and Mitch Kupchak were dumped and Magic Johnson became basketball boss, Deng played his last meaningful minutes as a Laker. He missed the final 22 games of last season. He made a substitute start on opening night this year, played 13 minutes, scored one basket, and hasn’t played in the 54 games since.
“This is going to be a phase in my career when I look back and wonder, how could this have happened?” Deng said.
It puts everyone in a tough position, but they’re trying to make the most of it. Here’s Luke Walton from Wednesday when asked which player he would let coach the team if doing a something similar to what Steve Kerr did with the Warriors earlier this week.
Luke Walton is asked: if he had to turn over coaching duties to a player on his roster for one game, who would it be? He pondered for at least 15 seconds and said, “Luol Deng.”
— Tania Ganguli (@taniaganguli) February 14, 2018
Walton’s quote could be seen as a bit cruel given how he won’t play him on the court at all, but it does hint to a small sliver of truth: Deng can be an important contributor; the situation just isn’t right for him right now.
It’s all a bit of a mess, and it’s clearly taken its toll. Here’s a particularly painful exerpt from Plashke’s story.
The other night before the Lakers’ victory against Oklahoma City, Deng looked at that game’s pristine black uniform hanging there and shook his head with a weary laugh.
“If the Lakers ever sell my jersey after I leave, whoever gets it, a good deal, huh?” the Nowhere Man said, moments before heading off to another pretend game on another empty night. “Never used. Good as new.”
You really have to feel for the guy, but as the season carries on, it seems like he’s getting closer to a resolution of his time in L.A. The Lakers need him off the books if they are serious about retooling the team in Magic Johnson’s vision. And that’s a vision without Deng on the roster.
