Point guard Dwight Buycks will be unavailable for the rest of the regular season thanks to a broken right hand he suffered in Sunday’s game, tweets Mike Trudell of Lakers.com, and the timing of the injury was especially unfortunate for Buycks. The Lakers were about to re-sign him, as his 10-day contract expired overnight, according to Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times (Twitter link). Coach Byron Scott said before Sunday’s game that he expected the team to re-up with Buycks for the final two games of the season.
The Lakers are down to eight healthy players, notes Bill Oram of the Orange County Register, who confirms that the team planned to re-sign Buycks before his injury. The team only has two healthy guards and no healthy small forwards, Pincus tweets, so it seems doubtful the Lakers would use up roster room on another injured player. The Lakers have a full 15-man roster, so the notion that the team was to re-sign Buycks signaled that the league was ready to once more grant the Lakers an extra roster spot via the hardship provision, given their multitude of injuries. Conceivably, the Lakers will seek to sign a different player using the hardship exception, though it’s unclear if they indeed plan to do so.
Pincus raised the possibility that the Lakers would have signed Buycks to a deal that included next season (Twitter link), a move they couldn’t have used the hardship exception to make, as Pincus pointed out earlier (on Twitter). The Lakers would have had to waive a player to accommodate any deal for Buycks that went beyond this season.
Buycks spent last year with the Raptors, but he’s been well-traveled this season, spending time in China, Spain, and with the Thunder’s D-League affiliate before signing his 10-day deal with the Lakers. The 26-year-old averaged 8.7 points in 20.5 minutes per game in six appearances for the purple-and-gold.