Overview:
Gabe Vincent has shot 50% from three-point range and 60% overall while scoring 25 points in the Lakers’ first three preseason games
A UC Santa Barbara basketball player made the ultimate pledge to team captain Gabe Vincent during their 23-win season of 2018.
“I’d go to war anytime, anyplace with that guy,” J.D. Slajchert said.
That time actually almost came that season at 8:08 a.m. on Jan. 13 at a hotel near Waikiki Beach.
All the cell phones on the Hawai‘ian Islands — including the ones in our Gaucho basketball traveling group — suddenly blew up with high-pitched squeals and a text-message alert that had been typed in all caps:
BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
The next 38 minutes and 13 seconds were a mind-bending whirlwind of confusion and worry.
Tires were screeching on the street below my third-floor hotel room. You could see people scurrying on the sidewalks in every direction.
A Honolulu television station soon warned us that “the Pacific Command had detected a missile launch from North Korea” — and that instant death was heading straight for us.
“Stay off the streets, seek shelter, and pull over if you’re driving on a roadway,” the station’s talking head declared.
Several frantic Gauchos and their families huddled in the hotel stairwell in what would’ve been, clearly, a hopeless attempt to survive nuclear vaporization.
But Vincent pushed no panic buttons.
He calmly dressed himself, picked up his backpack and headed straight to the hotel lobby in the quest of gaining a better grip on the situation.
“There was a military guy down here talking to people,” he told me about an hour later. “He was saying that it might be fake.
“All the speculation came out, and then we found out it was actually a false alarm. Obviously, we were glad to hear that.”
I asked Vincent how he could remain so cool in a situation that seemed so dire.
It came the hard way, he replied, during the long, arduous recovery from major knee surgery just a year earlier.
“Adversity is inevitable,” Vincent explained. “You’re going to face it, one way or another.
“Usually it’s more on the court.
“But with all these natural disasters and things going on in the world, a lot of it is off the court … and that’s a different battle you must adjust to.”
Last season — five years after he wasn’t spooked by a nuke — Vincent was pledged $33 million by the Los Angeles Lakers to soldier them through the next three NBA campaigns.
But UCSB’s all-time leading three-point shooter had to face more adversity before launching many more of his own long-range missiles.
Taking a Knee
Vincent played 90 games, starting all 22 in the playoffs, while helping the Miami Heat advance to the 2023 NBA Finals.
The 6-foot-3 guard had appeared in 68 games the previous year and spent every professional offseason in either the NBA Pro Summer League or in international competition.
“It was pretty much like four or five years straight of basketball,” Vincent said.
“When the year was done, I was playing World Games or stuff like that with Nigeria, so it was a long stretch of basketball for me.”
And that stretched the limits of a reconstructed left knee that, he mused, had developed “a mind of its own.”
Vincent played in the Lakers’ first four contests of last season but missed the next 23 while undergoing plasma therapy.
He returned on Dec. 20 for a game in Chicago, but 11 minutes of pain convinced him to schedule another surgery for just three days later.
“It was just some old wear and tear in the knee,” Vincent said. “Just clean up. Nothing too crazy.”
He didn’t play again until March 31, and he was clearly not himself even then.
The same player who had averaged 12.7 points for Miami in the 2023 playoffs, shooting 37.8% from the three-point line, made just 10.7% of his threes while scoring at a 3.1-point clip in 11 regular-season games with the Lakers.
They lost to the Denver Nuggets in the NBA’s Western Conference playoffs. Vincent shot 14.3% from three and averaged 1.4 points in five games.
He admittedly felt deflated, but not defeated. All those trials and tribulations, he insisted, only “make me stronger.”
“I definitely have moments of that deep frustration of like, ‘Man! Again? We have to deal with this in this way?’” he said. “I wish it could just be a simple route.
“But this path has shaped me into who I am … and I’m very grateful for it, and for the qualities it’s helped me gain.”
His parents, Cynthia and Franklyn Vincent, put him on the right course. Both have doctorates in psychology.
“They helped instill some things within me like how to deal with people, how to deal with adversity, how to respond to situations,” Vincent said. “I’m not sure how much of it was intentional but it’s helped me very much.
“Just staying level-headed and managing situations when things get too high, and I balance myself out, or when things get too low, and I balance myself out.
“I try to stay as even-keeled as possible.”
Summer Job
Vincent went to work strengthening both his knee and his skills in the five months since Los Angeles’ ouster from the NBA playoffs.
“Taking advantage of this unfortunate longer summer off has been huge for my body, huge for my game,” he said. “I’m looking forward to those changes hopefully showing this season and playing a lot more than 11 games.”
The Lakers made few changes during the offseason besides the hiring of new head coach J.J. Redick.
But that coach believes that getting a healthy Vincent for an entire season is just the addition the team needs.
“He’s easy to coach,” Redick said. “You know what he’s going to be … the day-to-day consistency.
“I knew that he was super-professional. Rob (Pelinka, Lakers’ general manager) talked about that when I got the job.
“We have a lot of these guys — I feel very fortunate — but you’re like, ‘Man I wish I had 10 Gabe Vincents.’”
His shooting in the Lakers’ first three preseason games has been even better than it was during his playoff run with Miami.
He’s made 5-of-10 threes and 9-of-15 shots overall while scoring 25 points in 37 minutes of play.
“I can still defend, I can make an open shot, I can play-make for guys,” Vincent said, “so I’m curious to see the way things will shake out in terms of role definition and so forth.
“But I am looking forward to helping this team win basketball games.”
Redick has projected a major bench role for Vincent within a system that promotes up to 40 three-pointers per game.
“I think the biggest thing for him is just having a really aggressive mentality,” he said. “Don’t turn down shots … Coming off an action, your first shot is shoot a three.
“For him, specifically, I think just creating that level of freedom and clear-mindedness is important.”
The Lakers will play three more preseason games this week before opening the regular season against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Oct. 22.
“The excitement for me is even more than last year,” Vincent said, “because I had the game taken away for some period of time.”
He lived to see a new day in 2018, and another one is just around the corner.
