The Los Angeles Lakers have good depth in the backcourt, but that could change over the next several weeks.
D’Angelo Russell, Austin Reaves, Lonnie Walker IV and Dennis Schroder will be free agents this summer. It will be difficult for Los Angeles to retain all four on new contracts, and there could be a scenario in which none of the four come back.
Even if it loses just one of those players, it will need to find at least one replacement. Luckily, the Lakers have the No. 17 and No. 47 picks in the 2023 NBA draft, which could yield a solid, reliable guard.
One guard they recently worked out is Cameron Shelton of Loyola Marymount University.
Shelton can score the basketball
Shelton is a 6-foot-2, 185-pound guard who played his first three seasons of college ball at Northern Arizona University before suiting up for LMU the last two years.
He’s a local who grew up in La Verne, which is on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County about half an hour east of downtown L.A.
Shelton is a scorer, pure and simple. He loves to penetrate the lane and attack the rim, where he is a pretty good finisher. He averaged 21.4 points a game while shooting 49.1% from the field this past season, and his overall efficiency has greatly improved over the past couple of years.
One reason is the improvement he has shown with his 3-point shooting. In the 2021-22 campaign, he made 27.8% of such attempts, but this past season he improved to 37.9% from that distance while almost doubling his number of attempts.
Shelton is effective in drawing fouls. He attempted 5.6 free throws a game in the 2022-23 season and 4.9 a game for his five-year college career. However, he needs to improve his stroke from the charity stripe. He was at 70.3% this past season and 70.5% throughout his career.
Although he isn’t a natural point guard, he has shown some ability to get others involved with his average of 4.3 assists a contest this past year.
Defensively, Shelton can get steals and deflections, as evidenced by his career average of 1.4 steals a game. However, his slight frame could cause him to get hunted at the next level.
The guard is expected to either be taken late in the second round or go undrafted.
