The Los Angeles Lakers won’t be winning the NBA championship in 2025, but one of their former players will. The Oklahoma City Thunder, Minnesota Timberwolves, New York Knicks, and Indiana Pacers are the four teams left standing, and all have one player who once represented the Lakers.
The one with the best shot at winning the title, as things stand, is Thunder guard Alex Caruso. Caruso helped the team finish with a league-best 68-14 record in 2024-25 and has been immense for them in these playoffs. Not many would have seen this coming after he went undrafted in 2016.
The Lakers signed Caruso for the 2017 Summer League, and he made a positive impression there. He would sign two-way deals with the franchise in 2017 and 2018 before finally getting a two-year deal in 2019.
Caruso would help the Lakers win the NBA championship in 2020, but he wouldn’t be with them for much longer. He joined the Chicago Bulls in free agency in 2021, and letting him go was one of the biggest mistakes made by the Lakers in recent years.
Caruso finished his Lakers career with averages of 5.9 points, 2.3 rebounds, 2.4 assists, 1.0 steals, and 0.3 blocks per game. He has grown a lot as a player since 2021, and the Lakers would love to have him among their ranks today.
Standing between Caruso and another trip to the NBA Finals is Timberwolves star Julius Randle, who also spent four seasons with the Lakers. They selected Randle with the seventh pick of the 2014 NBA Draft, and his career got off to the worst possible start.
Randle broke his right tibia on his Lakers debut but managed to rebound well from that setback. He had three productive seasons with the team, but they renounced their rights to him in 2018.
That made Randle an unrestricted free agent, and he would sign with the New Orleans Pelicans. He ended up averaging 13.5 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 0.6 steals, and 0.5 blocks per game as a Laker. Letting Randle go might not necessarily have been a mistake at the time, but the Lakers were criticized for letting him walk for nothing.
Someone who certainly wasn’t let go for nothing was now-Knicks forward Josh Hart. The Utah Jazz drafted Hart with the 30th pick of the 2017 NBA Draft, but traded him (along with a certain someone who’ll be mentioned soon) that night to the Lakers.
Hart spent two seasons with the Lakers, averaging 7.9 points, 3.9 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 0.9 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game in that time. He showed some promise, but was then shipped to the Pelicans in 2019 as part of the package for Anthony Davis. That move certainly worked out for the Lakers.
Lastly, the man the Jazz traded along with Hart to the Lakers was Thomas Bryant, who now plays for the Indiana Pacers. Bryant was waived after his rookie season but then briefly returned in 2022. He would be traded midway through the 2022-23 campaign to the Denver Nuggets for Davon Reed and multiple second-round picks, and went on to win the championship with them.
Bryant averaged 9.3 points, 5.3 rebounds, 0.6 assists, 0.3 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game as a Laker. His second stint proved to be far more productive than the first, but his absence wasn’t really felt.
Bryant is the only one of these four who isn’t playing a big role in these playoffs. Caruso has shone, as stated earlier, while Randle is having the best postseason of his career with the Timberwolves. As for Hart, he remains the glue guy for the Knicks. They all have aspirations of hoisting that trophy, but only one will succeed in that quest.
