The Lakers waived Dalton Knecht on Monday, their 2024 first-round pick, the No. 17 selection, gone to make the math work before Wednesday's opener against the Warriors. The official version is tidy: a roster crunch, a player who couldn't crack the rotation, a cap casualty. The real version is uglier. The Lakers took a shooter who looked like a real find, put him through a trade that blew up, and then spent a year and a half making sure he never got his feet back under him.
Go back to his rookie season and tell me this was a player with no future. Knecht dropped 37 on Utah with nine threes. He had a game where he hit all five of his attempts from deep. For a stretch in that first year he genuinely looked like a third scoring option next to LeBron James and Anthony Davis, the kind of cheap rookie contributor every contender begs for. You don't manufacture that. The talent was there, and everyone in that building saw it.
Then came the part nobody talks about honestly. At the February 2025 deadline, the Lakers packaged Knecht, Cam Reddish, an unprotected 2031 first-round pick and a 2030 swap to Charlotte for Mark Williams. Days later it collapsed, rescinded when Williams failed his physical. Knecht had already said his goodbyes, already started processing a new life, and then got shipped back to a team that had just told him, in plain terms, that he was an asset to be spent. "It was a crazy time," he said at the time. "It felt like a movie." His response was about as professional as it gets: "I get it's a business, so at the end of the day, I told them, 'Let's just go play basketball.'"
The Lakers never let him do that. After he came back, his second season cratered: around four points a night, a dreadful clip from three, one start all year, double-digit minutes only twice after mid-February. A player who'd been trusted with real responsibility was reduced to a guy wondering whether he'd check in at all. Usage like that teaches a young shooter to second-guess the only thing that made him valuable.
The preseason, though, was a disaster. Terrible shooting numbers, no rhythm, nothing to hang a roster spot on. The front office spent the summer stacking the backcourt and wing with Quentin Grimes, Matisse Thybulle and Ziaire Williams, veterans who defend, which is exactly what Knecht never did. He made himself easy to cut. If you're defending Pelinka, that's your case.
But ask why the preseason looked like that. A shooter lives on confidence and reps, and the Lakers starved him of both after dangling him in a deal that fell apart on a technicality. You can't yank a 25-year-old's role out from under him, bury him on the bench, bring in three players to leapfrog him, and then act surprised when he shows up in October looking lost. This is an organization creating the outcome it wanted to see.
This is the same front office that keeps whiffing on the margins while LeBron's clock runs out. They couldn't even complete the trade cleanly, then couldn't find a taker to move him with a tiny salary attached, so they just ate the money and waived him. Every step of this was a self-own.
Maybe Knecht lands somewhere, gets minutes and a green light, and reminds everyone what a confident shooter looks like. He has no new team yet. If he does figure it out elsewhere, remember that the Lakers had him first, had him cheap, and talked themselves out of him. The front office drafted him, broke him, then cut him.
