Rookie forward Tarik Black joins the Lakers
On Sunday, the Lakers were able to secure the rights to forward Tarik Black, who was released by the Rockets on Friday when Houston needed to make room in their roster so they could acquire the services of Josh Smith. Lakers fans hope that they made the right move, and price per head bookmaking companies believe that the player could be of great benefit to the team.
“He’s a big, physical string kid who’s very intelligent and we’d love to see him get here as quick as possible so we can get him in action on the practice court and then we’ll go from there,” said coach Byron Scott. “From some of our reports about him he’s very active on the defensive end and a great communicator on the defensive end and those are two things we need from our bigs. We’ll see how he translates that from Houston to here.”
Xavier Henry, swingman for the Lakers, was released by the team at the same time in order to make room in the roster for Black. Many fans were very concerned when they saw that in November, the player suffered an injury to his Achilles while he was holding practice, and his season came to an end.
Earlier in the week, sources reported that the Rockets offered a few of their players who were sitting in the roster’s bottom third after they were able to secure Smith’s assurance to open a space in the roster in that manner. However, Black was released by Houston when the team wasn’t able to find a proper trade after the power forward – who was undrafted – made it to the their roster during training camp.
Black, in 25 meetings played with Houston, had an average of 4.2 points as well as 5.1 rebounds in 15.7 minutes-per-game. This season, the player was able to feature in 25 meetings for the Rockets, and he started in 12 of them.
And Black, who’s 6 feet 11, is set to start playing for the Lakers in their game against the Nuggets on Tuesday night. Price per head bookmaking companies will closely monitor how he performs in this game, but Black’s fans are confident that he should be able to fit right in with the Lakers, and believe that he could prove to be a very important part of the team.
