No, not Lonzo Ball. The jury is out on him … and may remain sequestered for a year or three. No idea how that verdict will come down.

Talking here about Kyle Kuzma, the 27th pick in the first round of this year’s NBA draft.

The 6-foot-9 forward Kyle Kuzma who scored 38 points and made seven three-pointers (see it here) in the Lakers’ 122-116 victory at Houston tonight, the result which ended the Rockets’ 14-game winning streak.

Kuzma, 22, is averaging 17.4 points per game, with 6.6 rebounds. He looks like one of the prizes of the 2017 draft, and the fact that the Lakers got him without actually holding the 27th pick is a credit to management, because Kuzma looks like a key performer for the club, going forward.

How did this work out?

The Lakers made a draft night trade with the Brooklyn Nets, sending erratic 2015 No. 2 pick D’Angelo Russell and $64-million-man Timofey Mozgov, a plodding center and one of former Lakers executive Jim Buss’s innumerable mistakes, and getting in return veteran center Brook Lopez and Kuzma.

Lopez was expected to contribute as a deep-shooting big man, with Kuzma the throw-in.

But within a month, Kuzma was having his way in a summer league in Las Vegas, showing a fine shooting touch — finer, in fact, than he had demonstrated in college, which is pretty much unheard of. The NBA is way, way harder than the NCAA.

As a redshirt junior at Utah, Kuzma averaged 16.2 points on 50.4 percent shooting, including a tepid 32.1 from three-point range and a subpar 66.9 percent from the line.

With the Lakers, Kuzma is shooting 50.7 percent overall, a fine 40.5 from the deeper NBA three territory and 76.6 from the line.

How he made that jump in shooting accuracy from college to the NBA is not quite clear, and it probably is due for some reversion to the mean, though he was making shots almost from the moment he appeared in Las Vegas and was, eventually, named MVP of the league.

He competes for playing time with the more-physical Larry Nance Jr., whom the Lakers like, and 2014 No. 7 pick Julius Randle, who a year ago looked like a key building block for the club and now is an off-the-bench force.

With two offense-oriented starters (Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Lopez) not playing, Kuzma started against the Rockets with a brief to go out and score — which he did prolifically, helping the Lakers survive 51 from James Harden.

Kuzma’s 38 is the second-best total by a Lakers rookie on the road, eclipsed only by the 41 Elgin Baylor put up in 1959.

Certainly, some rookies have entered the NBA with a productive couple of months, only to be exposed as other teams counter their favorite moves. But we have to think that anyone who has averaged 17.4 and 6.6 after 28 games and two-plus months in the league … probably is headed for a long and productive career, barring injury.

That is important to the Lakers, whose prize pick, Lonzo Ball with the second choice in the draft, continues to adjust to the pace of the NBA — while having fairly severe problems scoring from anywhere.

If those two are going at a steady clip, come the end of the season, the Lakers will look more interesting to potential free agents like Paul George, or even LeBron James.

The 27th pick is long after the area of the draft where NBA teams can be fairly certain they have picked a future star — or at least a starter. Check the history of the 27th picks. Note that Larry Nance was a No. 27 pick from 2015. Also note how most of the guys picked there were not stars.

If Kuzma keeps this up, the Lakers’ road to being competitive may be shorter than many of us expected it might be.