Hello, Lakers Nation. Welcome into the Lakers Nation.com podcast. I am Trevor Lane.

Exciting time of year. We are now one week, seven days away from the Lakers kicking off preseason play.

We've got a bunch of topics we're going to talk about on today's show. DeAngelo Russell,

his Lakers future, Max Christie, his role this coming season, Jalen Hood-Shafino.

Is there any hope for the former 17th overall pick? Plus, we'll dive into the mailbag.

Joining me on the show today, it is Donnie Freeman. Donnie, how you doing?

I'm doing pretty good. I finally got my green screen set up for the people. And I want to know if you guys

like that background, if you have any recommendations, let me know. I want to just set something

perfect back there that, you know, it's just captivating and all that stuff. But otherwise,

I'm really good. I'm excited to talk Lakers. I dig it. I think it looks good, but everybody,

let us know in the comment section if you like it or not podcast listeners.

I guess I could describe it to you, but best bad is just to head over to YouTube.com slash Lakers Nation.

Take a peek at it and then let us know over in the review section on the podcast side.

So we have the presser, J.J. Reddick, Rob Polenka, other day. There's been a lot of talk about that, and we'll get into a lot of the different topics coming around there. But coming up on Monday, we've got Lakers Media Day. Then we've got training camp for a few days. And then the Lakers play a week from today. They're going to take on the Minnesota Timberwolves to open preseason. So we are here. It is time. And let's dive into, I think, a topic that maybe we haven't talked about enough. And that's DeAngelo Russell and his future with the Lakers. There's been a lot of focus on Austin. And not all of that is on us. Some of it is, but not all of that is on,

is on us because every chance he gets to praise somebody, JJ Redick has been talking about

Austin Reeves. We've talked a lot about the center position. We've talked about LeBron. We've

talked about Anthony Davis. We've talked about Rui Hachamura and how his role is going to change.

DeAngel Russell kind of becomes the forgotten guy in all of this.

But JJ had some pretty strong comments about DeLo and thinking that he can have a career year for the Lakers this coming season.

Donnie, where are you at with DeAngelo Russell right now?

How are you feeling about him moving forward with this team,

given that we weren't really expecting him to maybe be on the team this season?

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