Los Angeles Lakers Roster Challenges: The Adou Thiero Opportunity
September has arrived, and the Los Angeles Lakers still look incomplete.
The front office chased Jonathan Kuminga and missed. He’s heading to the Minnesota Timberwolves on a two-year deal, and that swing-and-miss has real consequences. As Khobi Price reported for the California Post, the failed pursuit leaves a clear gap in the frontcourt and almost no clean way to fill it.
Cap Squeeze, Roster Crunch
The numbers are brutal. The Lakers sit just $8.1 million below the NBA’s $209 million first-apron line and are hard-capped for the 2026-27 season. They already have 16 players on guaranteed contracts. That’s not just a crowded locker room; it’s a roster gridlocked by the cap sheet.
Free agency offers little help. The market is thin, and the names left are more stopgaps than solutions. A trade? That’s complicated too. The Lakers have burned through most of their best assets in previous deals, leaving them short on the kind of ammunition it usually takes to land a difference-maker.
So the question hanging over the franchise a month before training camp isn’t just who they can get. It’s whether they can get anyone at all.
Turning Inward: The Adou Thiero Bet
If no outside move materializes, the Lakers’ answer will have to come from within. That points directly to 22-year-old forward Adou Thiero, one of the few young players on this roster who still carries genuine upside.
Price notes that Thiero is among the small group of Lakers expected to see a bump in opportunity after the Kuminga chase collapsed. On paper, there’s a reason for that. Thiero stands 6-foot-8 and 220 pounds; Kuminga is listed at 6-foot-7 and 225. Both bring high-end athleticism and unusual quickness for their size. Physically, it’s the same template.
The gap comes with the ball.
Kuminga is far more advanced offensively — both in skill and production. Thiero, by comparison, is still learning the league, still figuring out how to translate his tools into reliable impact. Yet Kuminga’s absence opens a lane. As Price put it, without Kuminga there’s now a pathway for Thiero to sit on the fringes of the rotation.
That’s not nothing on a team still trying to squeeze a title run out of its veteran core.
Raw, But Rising
Thiero’s rise isn’t hypothetical. It started late last season.
The second-year forward battled lower-body injuries and spent most of the 2025-26 campaign in the G League, where he logged the kind of minutes he was never going to see in Los Angeles. When the Lakers needed fresh legs and energy down the stretch, he got his shot. By season’s end, he was earning consistent minutes in the playoffs, a clear sign the coaching staff trusted at least his effort and athleticism on the big stage.
July pushed the intrigue further. In summer league action in San Francisco and Las Vegas, Thiero turned heads with a string of highlight plays — lobs finished above the rim, hard-nosed rebounding, flashes of defensive versatility on bigger forwards. The tape was loud. The message was quieter but just as important: he’s still raw, still very much a work in progress.
That’s the balance with Thiero. The promise is obvious, the polish is not.
Filling the Kuminga-Sized Void
What the Lakers wanted from Kuminga is exactly what Thiero is trying to become.
They need a bigger wing who can pressure the rim as a lob threat, crash the glass with force, and hold up defensively against stronger forwards. Those were the boxes Kuminga was expected to tick in purple and gold. According to Price, they’re the same responsibilities Thiero is physically equipped to handle.
He’s not a starting-caliber player yet. Not close. But he brings juice. He flies around, lives above the rim, and injects a level of athleticism the Lakers otherwise lack on the wing. Put that next to an elite offensive creator — the way similar profiles have thrived next to someone like Luka Doncic — and the role becomes simpler: run, cut, defend, finish.
The opportunity is there now in a way it wasn’t before. Playing time should be easier to find if the Lakers commit to a bigger, more dynamic wing in the rotation. With the cap tight, the trade options thin, and the clock ticking toward camp, the franchise may have no choice but to find out just how quickly Adou Thiero can grow into that role.
The roster hole is real. The margin for error is shrinking. The Lakers are about to learn whether one of their least proven players can help solve one of their biggest problems.
