Los Angeles Lakers Offer Roy Hibbert the Biggest Stage to Resurrect Career

Roy Hibbert was an All-Star as recently as the 2013-14 season. Now the 7’2” center brings his defensive power to the bright lights and big stage of the Los Angeles Lakers with a chance to reclaim his elite form.

The Lakers front office first chased after LaMarcus Aldridge, DeAndre Jordan and Greg Monroe in the opening days of free agency. But as team general manager Mitch Kupchak recently revealed, there was a backup plan in place all along.

“Not knowing what would happen, we had a contingency plan set up with Indiana,” Kupchak said during a TWC interview with Chris McGee. “If we did not get so-and-so and so-and-so, then the deal for Hibbert would kick in.”

The Lakers’ fallback position was an extremely safe gamble—trading only a future second-round draft pick to the Indiana Pacers, per Lakers.com. The team will also assume the final year of Hibbert’s contract at $15,514,031. 

Hibbert joins an interesting mixture of veterans and very young players, including five-time champion Kobe Bryant and this year’s No. 2 draft pick, D’Angelo Russell. The youth contingent also includes last year’s No. 7 pick, Julius Randle, who missed all but 14 minutes of his rookie season with a broken leg, as well as Jordan Clarkson—the speedy NBA All-Rookie First Team selection.

It should be noted that Indiana was looking to move in a faster, smaller direction by trading Hibbert. At the end of the season, per Candace Buckner of the Indianapolis Star, Pacers coach Frank Vogel acknowledged the likelihood of a lesser role for the two-time All-Star.

“We'll have to see how it all plays out and what the roster ultimately looks like,” Vogel said, “but there's a possibility that Roy's role will be diminished, if we're trying to play faster and trying to play smaller.”

Meanwhile, in the Western division, Kupchak will be looking for a comeback effort from Hibbert, per the TWC interview:

"

For some reason the last year or so in Indiana, he kind of lost his way. I did talk to him recently and he didn’t put blame on anyone except himself. We know he’s going to play hard, it’s a contract year, so we’ll get his best effort. We’re hoping that at 28, we can see a player who can do some things that we just talked about, rebound and defend and block shots, and protect the rim, which is something we desperately need.

"

Hibbert, whose strengths have always been in the low post, will have backup help from a couple of young players with similar mindsets. Tarik Black went undrafted last year and will be back for his second season with the Lakers, as will Robert Upshaw—an undrafted 7-foot shot-blocking savant who is on the team's summer league squad and is also expected to sign a two-year non-guaranteed contract, according to ESPN's Baxter Holmes.

The hope is that in addition to what Hibbert brings on the court, he can also serve as a mentor to Black and Upshaw, teaching them all the tricks of the pivot trade. And, the former Indiana frontcourt anchor isn't exactly ancient—he’s only heading into his eighth NBA season.  

Much has been made about the mammoth center’s train wreck status during the 2014 playoffs, carrying over into this season’s tenure in Indiana’s dog house. And yet it’s also worth noting that the Pacers were the league’s fourth-best team defensively this season, despite being without Paul George and George Hill for most of the year.

Despite Hibbert’s recent murky mess, it’s not unreasonable to believe he can return to last year’s regular season fettle, which resulted in an All-Star appearance and finishing second in Defensive Player of the Year voting.

As Kupchak alluded to, better rim protection is an urgent requirement for the Lakers—the team gave up 105.3 points per game this past season, the second-most porous defense in the league. That lackluster effort was compounded by averaging 98.5 points at the other end of the floor. 

The result was a 21-61 record—the worst in franchise history. If Hibbert can help plug the sieve defensively and make an offensive contribution on par with his career average of 11.1 points per game, L.A. should have a net gain—especially compared with what they got defensively from Jordan Hill.

Even with a down season, Hibbert was the NBA’s 13th-best shot-blocker, per Basketball-Reference, with 125 total blocks. He also had the 17th-best defensive rating at 100.6. Hill, meanwhile, didn’t crack the top 20 in either category, with 52 blocks and a defensive rating of 109, i.e. allowing 109 points per 100 possessions.

	eFG%	oRTG	dRTG	TR%	BLK%
Hibbert	.446	101	100.6	15.5	5.1
Hill	.461	101	109	16.4	2.3

The hope is that Hibbert can improve on a respectable season and get back to where he was before as a feared interior defender—he was the league’s fourth-best shot-swatter in 2013-14 with 182 blocks and second-best the season before with 206 rejections.

But Hibbert also has a particular signature move that isn’t reflected in standard stats—one that has been confounding opposing players for years. It’s all about timing a straight-up jump in the air to defend an opponent at the rim—the law of verticality.

As Lee Jenkins of Sports Illustrated wrote: “Vogel explained to Hibbert the NBA's principle of verticality, which allows a defender to jump straight up and absorb contact from a ballhandler, as long as he establishes a legal defensive position before leaving the ground and remains vertical in the air.”

Hibbert embraced the concept and perfected it to a tee. “If someone serves up the ball, I'll send it out of there," the center said. “If he tucks it, I'm going straight up every time."

The Lakers will need Hibbert to use that verticality and other defensive tools to help bring the team back into contention.

That also means offering the big man one of the league’s largest stages to operate on—the Lakers still command a huge media market, and there’s all those championship banners as a reminder of the NBA’s ultimate prize.

With one year left on his contract, Hibbert has a chance to resurrect his career and make a case for an extended stay in Los Angeles.

It’s time for the big man to jump for the stars, once again.