Cameron Carr is set to make his first NBA summer league appearance for the Los Angeles Lakers tonight against the Golden State Warriors at the California Classic in San Francisco, giving the rookie his first live chance to show why the team moved up to get him. The Lakers took Carr with the 24th overall pick after trading up one spot with the New York Knicks.
That move came after Carr had been projected to go between No. 15 and No. 20 in the 2026 NBA draft, a range that made his slide to No. 24 harder to ignore. The Lakers did not wait long to act, and they also made their intentions clear by giving him No. 43, the same number he wore at Baylor and one that has been worn by only seven Lakers in the 65 years of the franchise’s Los Angeles era, with Brian Cook the most recent in 2007.
Carr arrives with numbers that explain why he drew attention in the first place. He averaged a team-high 18.9 points last season at Baylor, shot 37.4% from 3-point range, and added 5.8 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.3 blocks a game. At the predraft combine, he measured 6-foot-4 1/2 without shoes and had a wingspan of just more than 7 feet, then followed that by posting a 30-point, seven-rebound scrimmage with six 3-pointers. His line was unusual enough to stand out even in a league that sorts prospects by ceiling and fit.
His father, Chris Carr, has been pushing the same point from another angle. He said the family has been preparing for this moment for a long time, and that his son is being overlooked. Carr has leaned into that idea himself, saying he has always been behind and wants to prove he can be better than a lot of the people put in front of him. “That’s the chip on my shoulder — the fire on my feet,” he said, framing the debut as both a beginning and a test.
The family story gives the moment extra weight. Chris Carr was not invited to the 1995 NBA draft after starring at Southern Illinois, then learned he had been taken 56th overall by the Phoenix Suns while watching television in Sasser, Illinois. Now his son gets the stage much earlier and much more visibly, with the Lakers giving him an immediate shot to justify the trade up and the belief behind it. If Carr looks like the player the Lakers saw, this first Summer League game will be remembered as the start of that argument.
