The backcourt depth chart behind Doncic and Reaves just got a lot more honest

Already wrote this one Thursday, but it's worth a brief follow. Smart is Houston's problem now, and the Lakers are heading into training camp with a guard rotation that is thin in a way that's hard to paper over. Quentin Grimes and Collin Sexton are in the building — the signings were reported earlier this summer — but neither is a like-for-like replacement for what Smart brought defensively over 65 games last season.

The math here is straightforward. Doncic and Reaves are the offense. Everything else is depth, and depth at guard is now genuinely short. Smart averaged 9.7 points and 3.3 assists last season, which are not numbers that break a roster, but they represent real minutes that now need to go somewhere. Grimes and Sexton will absorb most of them, and we'll find out quickly whether either can hold up over a full season of that workload.

My read: this is the hole that doesn't get fixed before opening night. The front office moved on Smart, the market moved on, and training camp is days away. Doncic and Reaves will carry the load they were always going to carry. The question is just how thin it gets behind them when one of them misses time — and both were day-to-day not long ago.