- At one point during the season,
the Lakers reached out to former Nets and Bucks coach Jason Kidd to gauge his interest in coaching the team, should the position become available, a source told Frank Isola of The Athletic. A high-ranking Lakers official disputes this claim.
- Johnson is seen as an absentee executive, a label best illustrated by one moment last season. At the end of a week the Lakers were criticized for not backing Walton in the wake of LaVar Ball’s allegations that the coach had lost control of the locker room, Johnson turned up in Hawaii, on lockdown in a fallout shelter following the false missile alert.
- But the way Johnson described this Lakers plan, in an interview with SiriusXM NBA Radio, caught LeBron off guard.
Magic said the Lakers wanted to watch LeBron’s minutes and get the ball out of his hands some, because otherwise “now it is Cleveland all over again and we don’t want that.”
“I didn’t like that when I heard it, because, I mean, four straight Finals,” James told The Athletic earlier this season.
- Rondo’s snacks are their own story in leadership.
He started making sandwiches for teammates when he played in Sacramento. Then, his personal chef taught him to make cookies. Lonzo Ball likes to tell Rondo his chocolate chip cookies could be sold in stores.
- The need for reinforcements was glaring, and on the weekend of Jan. 25,
the Lakers had a tentative deal in place to acquire Bulls forward Jabari Parker in exchange for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Michael Beasley, league sources told
The Athletic. However, Caldwell-Pope — another Rich Paul client — had to approve any trade and
had not signed off on the deal. The Bulls awaited Caldwell-Pope’s approval over that weekend, sources said.
- The Lakers’ reported trade talks loomed over the team roster. Virtually every member of the young core had been linked to a trade for Davis, as had veterans Rondo and Beasley.
A schism developed in the locker room. Sources around the team said it was apparent that the young players no longer trusted James, believing he was operating behind the scenes to get them traded to New Orleans.
- At one point,
some in Walton’s circles feared Paul was trying to use the Davis situation to leverage a coaching change, with the premise being that his arrival would require a higher-caliber coach. But the Lakers received backchannel information that Davis liked Walton and that relieved pressure on the third-year head coach.
- In the Lakers’ last home game,
Johnson and Pelinka watched Muscala score 17 points, including three 3s, to power the Sixers to a win at Staples Center.
Did that single performance inspire the Lakers to make the move? Some believe so. 
- Pelinka told the second-year forward that he was key to the Lakers’ future and that, unless it was a trade for one of the game’s three best players, he wasn’t trading him.
A year earlier,
Larry Nance Jr. approached Pelinka with a similar question.
Nance Jr. and his fiancée, his college girlfriend,
were interested in buying a house. He wanted to get a sense of whether the Lakers planned on keeping him around, and
Pelinka told him that the Lakers would only trade him if it meant landing one of the game’s three best players. He told him to buy the house, multiple sources confirmed.
Before Nance could get that far, however,
he received a call on the morning of Feb. 8, 2018. He and Jordan Clarkson had been traded to Cleveland in a salary dump that cleared cap space for the Lakers to be able to offer two max slots in the summer.
- The Lakers will now turn their attention to an offseason in
which they are expected to revisit trade options for Davis, while also chasing top targets in free agency – as unlikely as it is that Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant or Klay Thompson will come, according to a league source who believes the Lakers will be second or third on those players’ lists. The fear that the Lakers could strike out with their top targets has already led to some message massaging.
I posted the best parts from that article..this franchise is embarrassing
