Fan favorite and hustling back up point guard Alex Caruso will be back with the Lakers.
With minutes available at the point, the Lakers went with a name they knew, a player who came up through their G-League program, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN.
Free agent guard Alex Caruso has agreed to a one-year deal to return to the Lakers, league source tells ESPN.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 6, 2019
Deal: two years, $5.5M https://t.co/5Xxrcd5j9u
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) July 6, 2019
Caruso will be fighting with Rajon Rondo and Quinn Cook for minutes.
Most likely Rondo will start at the point for the Lakers because he’s Rondo. There are politics to be played, veterans to be appeased. But the Lakers need to consider giving Caruso a real chance to get rotation minutes, he was +9.1 per 100 when on the court with LeBron last season.
The 6'5" point guard out of Texas A&M has good size and defends his position well, and he plays well working off the ball, or he can run the show as a lead guard for a stretch. He isn’t a great shooter, but he took two threes a game in the 25 games he was in last season and hit them (48 percent), and with his size he’s a pretty good finisher at the rim. His handles aren’t quite where they need to be, but we’ll see what the hard worker looks like after a summer in the gym.
Outside Los Angles, Caruso gets a shrug from fans, but in LA he’s become a fan favorite and has looked like a rotation-level guard. Which is basically what Rondo and Cook are. We’ll see what kind of minutes Caruso gets, but he deserves a few.
