There are very few things that Brandon Ingram can’t do on a basketball court, and the list of players who’ve possessed his combination of agility and wingspan is short. These attributes, combined with his youth and sterling work ethic, make him the NBA’s Mirror of Erised. It’s easy to look at him and see exactly what you want to see.
But there’s value in identifying who he currently is, because it gives us flickers of insight into his likeliest outcomes. A deeper dive into the present leads to a critique that is more directed at the Lakers’ organization than Ingram himself.