Training camp is getting close, and the Lakers still have one more guaranteed contract than the league allows on opening night.
The Los Angeles Lakers rebuilt their roster around guard Luka Doncic this summer, and the work came with a math problem the front office still has not solved.
The team is carrying 16 players on guaranteed standard contracts, which is one more than the 15 the league allows once the regular season begins, and with opening night a little over a month away nothing has happened yet to bring the number down.
It is not a crisis, but the longer it waits the more it hangs over everything else the franchise would rather be talking about.
The Numbers Problem
NBA reporter Jovan Buha reported the crunch back in July, noting the Lakers would have to trade or waive at least one player from the current group ahead of opening night.
The situation has not moved since.
The front office spent big to keep guard Austin Reaves and to add center Walker Kessler and wing Quentin Grimes, and Los Angeles already sits in luxury-tax territory with no exceptions left to spend, so the crowded depth chart leaves little room for sentiment.
Every day the decision waits, the options get narrower, because a trade requires a partner and a waived veteran still counts against the books.
The Candidates
Most of the outside attention has landed on wing Dalton Knecht, whose scoring fell from 9.1 points a game as a rookie to 4.2 last season.
Analyst Trevor Lane said on the Lakers Nation channel that the club also faces an October 31 deadline on his next option year, and he did not sound optimistic.
"My assumption is that if they had to make a decision right now, they would not pick up the $6.4 million team-option on Dalton Knecht," Lane said.
Kohbi Price of the California Post reported that guard Bronny James is seen as safe because of how much the organization has invested in his development, that guard Jaden Hardy is a name the club could still go either way on, and that forward Jarred Vanderbilt keeps coming up in trade ideas because his salary is the type that helps a bigger deal work.
The edges of the roster keep moving on their own too, as former Lakers guard Nick Smith Jr. took his market to Real Madrid rather than wait on an NBA offer.
The Cleanest Way Out
A trade is clearly the better path.
Waiving Knecht would mean paying a first-round pick to play somewhere else, while attaching him to Vanderbilt in a deal could turn two extra pieces into one rotation player and solve the count in a single move.
The Lakers believe they built a deep team, and outside voices like guard Norman Powell have already questioned how good it really is, so the last cut should bring back something useful instead of nothing.
Depth was the point of the whole summer, and the right move protects it while the wrong one simply throws a player away.
Whatever the front office chooses, it has to choose soon.
Camp opens with an extra body in the gym either way, and carrying an unresolved decision into October helps nobody in the locker room.
