If all goes as planned, today's NBA draft will start with a high school player, a Euro child and a college freshman, so imagine how it looks at Nos. 24 and 32, where some of the real doubt lies.

The priority for the Lakers' summer, which will lead into a season that could be the last in Los Angeles for Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson, among others, is a draft that perhaps won't help any of them in the short term.

As of Wednesday night, the Lakers had no plans to maneuver into the heart of a draft in which only a few of those chosen will have served as many as three years in college, or to trade out of it altogether.

That leaves skinny-armed projects and various other sloped-shouldered options, many of them young, most of them raw, and this for a franchise whose off-season will turn on adding some gray (Gary Payton, P.J. Brown, Juwan Howard, Karl Malone), not green.

"There's a lot of projecting going on," General Manager Mitch Kupchak said. "Nine times out of 10, when you're drafting 24 and 32, you're hoping to get a player who will project down the road as a good player. It's unlikely he'll contribute next year. It's not impossible, but you're trying to project down the road."