Gabe Vincent is looking like himself again, and just in time

After struggling early in the year, Gabe Vincent has turned his season around and is finally providing the type of production the Lakers envisioned.

If you had asked me at Thanksgiving what I thought about Gabe Vincent and his future with the Lakers, I would have told you he was the rotation player most likely to be shipped out by the February trade deadline and that I’d have been totally fine to see him swapped out for someone who could offer the type of production needed for his salary slot.

I’d have told you that if you make $11 million a season and your best attribute is your defense, you need to be a Jarred Vanderbilt-level defender and probably need to be Vando’s size, too. Gabe is neither.

He also wasn’t supposed to be a defense-only player, but by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, he was shooting 30.4% from the field overall and 19.4% from behind the arc, scoring just 36 points on 46 shots in 231 minutes played across 14 games in the entire month of November.

After injury led to a mostly lost season in his first year and a month and a half of severe struggles to start his second campaign, it just wasn’t working out here for Gabe.

Yes, the defense and commitment to do all the little things while playing hard was there. That stuff should not be cast aside as meaningless. The coaches clearly loved him and continued to give him rotation minutes exactly because of this type of professionalism and commitment.

But Gabe was supposed to be more than the try-hard, gritty defensive player trusted by his coaches to be in the right spot. And he just wasn’t.

In December, though, that changed.

On Dec. 1, with the team down both Austin Reaves and D’Angelo Russell, Gabe got the starting nod against the Jazz. He played 32 minutes and hit four of his five shots to score 10 points, his first double-digit scoring game of the season. A few days later, in consecutive games against the Heat and the Hawks a few days later, Vincent got up 11 shots in both games, showing an aggression and assertiveness in looking for his own offense that had been missing for most of the year.

All those shots didn’t fall — he went 8-22 in the two games — but the fact that he was taking those shots at all was a huge step forward. By the time the month finished, Vincent was clearly in a much better rhythm, shooting 43.3% from the field and 44.4% from behind the arc while more than doubling his scoring average from November.

Through February, this trend has continued and Vincent looks like the player he was in his final season with the Heat, confidently hunting his own offense by taking stepback and pull-up jumpers, all while bringing the intensity, fight, and defensive know-how that earned him minutes in the first place after being an undrafted player out of UC Santa Barbara.

Over his last 20 games, Vincent is shooting 45.7% from the field, 40.4% from behind the arc, has 44 assists to just 17 turnovers and has 17 total stocks (steals + blocks). And in providing this type of production on both sides of the ball, Gabe has turned himself from most likely to be traded to invaluable rotation piece.

In fact, while the trade for Luka Dončić has rightfully taken all the oxygen in the coverage around the Lakers in the last couple of weeks, particularly in terms of how it affects the team’s trajectory toward being viable in the playoffs, Vincent’s return to form over the past month-plus is an under-covered reason why this team’s prospects are trending upwards, too.

Obviously, we can’t compare Gabe to a player like Luka, but it has been — and will forever be — vital to surround your superstar players with high-quality role players who can play both ends of the floor while also providing a baseline level of smarts and commitment to playing the right way. Fans of the Lakers know this well as players like Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, Robert Horry, Alex Caruso and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (among countless others) have proven it over and over again.

And recently, Vincent has been providing exactly that in many of the same ways as those role players from previous contending versions of Lakers teams, and it’s showing up where it matters most — in the wins and losses column.

The last time Gabe Vincent played in a game the Lakers lost was nearly a month ago, way back on Jan. 19 against the Clippers. That’s eight straight contests with Vincent available in which the team has claimed a victory, which makes sense given his uptick in shooting and his steady defense.

On the other side of the ledger, in the three games he’s missed, the Lakers are 1-2 with the lone win being a single-digit victory against the Hornets where the Lakers jumped out to a massive early lead but had to hang on in the second half.

The two losses were against the 76ers and the Jazz, both games marred by a certain unseriousness and lack of commitment to doing all the little things that add up to playing winning basketball. The team couldn’t contain the dribble defensively, didn’t battle for positioning on switches and too often seemed to go through the motions rather than draw a line in the sand to turn the game back around.

In other words, the Lakers missed Gabe Vincent. Which are five words I did not think I’d be uttering this season just a few months ago.

You can follow Darius on BlueSky at @forumbluegold.