With the offseason’s biggest wave of transactions behind us, two major questions remain unresolved: What happens with LeBron James, and where does Jonathan Kuminga end up? While we wait for those answers, it is finally time to take a breath and begin digging into the Lakers’ new players.
And there are plenty of them.
The Lakers underwent a tectonic shift this summer, reshaping the roster and establishing a new vision around Luka Dončić. By my count, the current rotation features nine new names, not including the two-way spots.
But no newcomer carries as much weight, pressure, or expectation as Walker Kessler.
Kessler is the player at the center of the Lakers’ transformation. He is the player they went all-in on, investing their final pieces of tradable first-round draft capital and committing to a massive four-year, $130 million contract.
Ever since Luka arrived in Los Angeles, I have argued that rebuilding the team around him needed to start in the middle. So it should come as no surprise that Kessler is one of the most intriguing players I have analyzed in recent memory.
Because of the investment and the stakes involved, I cannot remember another player occupying my basketball thoughts quite as much as Kessler has over the past few weeks. And based on your votes in our recent reader survey, he was also the player whose profile you wanted to read first, by a wide margin.
Over the past week, I conducted an extensive data deep dive and watched at least 15 full Kessler games from the past two seasons. He appeared in only five games in 2025–26, so I also went further back to better understand the signals in the data, place them in context, and explore how his strengths and weaknesses might translate to his new role with the Lakers.
It is a role that comes with enormous expectations. Playing center for the Lakers means stepping into the shadow of some of the most iconic big men in NBA history. Those are huge shoes to fill, especially for a soon-to-be 25-year-old carrying the weight of the franchise’s biggest offseason investment.
I hope you enjoy reading this profile at least half as much as I enjoyed putting it together. As always, please leave your feedback in the comments or in our chat room. I will use it to help shape the player profiles still to come.
Today’s highlights:
Stats signals: Can Kessler become a Gobert-level defensive anchor?
Elite rim protection without fouling
Signals of activity and a high motor
A rare, even historic combination of rim protection and offensive rebounding
Overall defensive impact
Stats signals: Can Luka unlock more of Kessler’s offense?
Film room: What 15 full games revealed
Film room: The OKC test against the Lakers’ kryptonite
How confident can the Lakers be that this will work?
Data signals are typically where I start my player evaluations, so we’ll begin there with Kessler before moving on to observations from watching his film. There were two key questions I wanted to explore with Kessler.
The first comes naturally because of his connection to another former Jazz center: Rudy Gobert. Are there signals suggesting Kessler can eventually reach that level as a defensive anchor? Or, at the very least, how close can he come to the extraordinarily high bar set by a four-time Defensive Player of the Year and one of the two best defenders of the past decade?
There are four areas where the data suggests Kessler is already elite, or at least very close to it.
When discussing Kessler, you have to start with his greatest strength: rim protection. His advanced numbers immediately stand out. From ages 21 through 23, Kessler’s block percentage (BLK%) was almost identical to Rudy Gobert’s at the same ages (I excluded their age-24 seasons from the comparison because Kessler played only five games, making that tiny sample far less meaningful).
If we look at Genius Sports tracking data for shots defended at the rim, with the player identified as the closest defender, Kessler has actually outperformed Gobert as a rim protector. Only Chet Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama have allowed a lower field-goal percentage over the past four seasons.
There is one other trait Kessler shares with virtually all elite rim protectors, and one I highlighted in the Cleaning the Glass snapshot: a low foul rate. He protects the rim without fouling excessively and, as we’ll see in the impact data, significantly reduces his team’s overall foul rate when he is on the court.
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