LeBron James, the Lakers and the three-year search for a ‘laser’

EIGHT GAMES INTO his rookie season, back in the state where he became a college basketball phenomenon, all the elements were in place for Los Angeles Lakers forward Dalton Knecht to continue his storybook ascent in the sport.

It was Nov. 6, and Knecht was starting for the first time of his NBA career. His coach from the University of Tennessee, Rick Barnes, was sitting courtside in Memphis — with a Volunteers Elite Eight ring in his pocket he planned to present in person to the 6-6 wing who led the program further in the NCAA tournament it had been in more than a decade as he became an All-American in his lone season donning orange.

New Lakers coach JJ Redick, hoping to give his team an offensive jolt as it scuffled through a five-game road trip, dropping three of its first four, looked to Knecht, whom he’d already praised as being in the top “1% of shooters” in basketball.

Set up to be the warmest of homecomings — especially after the No. 17 pick in the draft lit up Las Vegas summer league with 21.3 points per game and exploded for 35 points in a preseason game against his idol, Kevin Durant — a cold, sharp NBA reality clocked him instead.

Literally.

With 5:46 left in fourth quarter, Knecht was elbowed in the face by the Grizzlies’ Jake LaRavia and had to exit the game, his first start ending with him being examined in the locker room. LaRavia hit him so hard, sources told ESPN, there was initial worry that Knecht had suffered a broken jaw.

Knecht finished with just three points on 1-for-7 shooting. The Lakers lost 131-114.

Redick wasn’t worried about the missed shots, but found the team’s competitiveness unacceptable after a stretch in which the Lakers’ last four losses came by an average of more than 14 points. And he told the players as much, ripping into them in the visitors locker room after the game.

A week later, Knecht and the Lakers had a chance at revenge, hosting the Grizzlies in L.A. This time, the kid who was named after Patrick Swayze’s character in “Road House” entered the game with a different mentality.

“Go for the throat,” Knecht told ESPN. “They tried to embarrass us on their home court.”

Beyond his still-aching jaw, Knecht was particularly miffed with how Ja Morant went at his teammate LeBron James, with the Memphis star “saying that he was pretty much the new king around here when Bron’s still in the league.”

Whichever the grievance, the approach worked. Knecht scored 19 points on 7-for-8 shooting (5-for-5 on 3s) and made back-to-back crucial plays in the fourth quarter, first hitting a 3 off a James feed and then throwing a lob to backup center Christian Koloko for a slam that helped fuel a 128-123 victory.

“They were real disrespectful,” Knecht said. “We had that game ready on our minds.”

In the eight games since, he has done nothing but average 17.4 points on 50% shooting and a sizzling 46.4% from deep, including a 37-point explosion against the Utah Jazz in which he hit nine 3s in 12 attempts. His emergence has done more than simply electrify the Lakers’ offense, which ranks fifth in the NBA after being a pedestrian 15th last season.

He also might be an answer to the Lakers’ three-year pursuit of a laser-shooting sidekick for LeBron, which would allow the team to prioritize other ways to round out the roster as trade season approaches and L.A. looks to give itself a chance at another championship before James retires.

“We, as a front office, have sort of chased in theory the exact player he is, a movement shooter,” Lakers vice president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka told ESPN.

“And then not only is he a movement shooter, but a movement shooter with athleticism, which is a really unique combination.”

BACK IN MARCH, Pelinka attended the SEC tournament in Nashville and linked up with an old friend, Steven Curtis Chapman, for a bourbon. It was there that the Grammy-winning recording artist offered some advice on where the GM should aim his scouting efforts.

“‘There’s a kid that plays on Tennessee,'” Pelinka remembered Chapman saying. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, Dalton. There’s no way. He’s a top-five pick. I am not going to spend all my time there.’ He was like, ‘No, my wife has a feeling. Like, he’s going to be a Laker.'”

Pelinka shrugged it off.

There was no guarantee L.A. would even have its first-round pick in June. The New Orleans Pelicans held the rights to it — the last bit of draft capital owed from the Anthony Davis trade five years ago — but could defer the pick to 2025. And even if the Lakers weren’t exactly tearing up the Western Conference standings and were very much in danger of missing the playoffs, it wasn’t as if they were playing so poorly that they would end up with a pick high enough in the lottery to select someone like Knecht.

“There’s no way,” Pelinka again told Chapman.

The Pelicans did end up deferring, with the 2025 draft headlined by Cooper Flagg promising to feature a deeper talent pool, so the Lakers kept their No. 17 pick. But they weren’t devoting any additional resources to Knecht than they were any other prospects ranked significantly higher than their draft slot.

Knecht never worked out for the Lakers, with his agents — Jeff Schwartz, Mike Lindeman and Anthony Coleman of Excel Sports Management — scheduling their client to visit only teams selecting much higher.

But as draft night unfolded and players made their way onstage to shake commissioner Adam Silver’s hand, Knecht — decked out in an all-black suit with a diamond-encrusted “DK” pendant hanging on a chain around his neck — was still waiting to hear his name.

Around the time Pitt’s Bub Carrington — a player the Lakers had coveted, sources told ESPN — went No. 14 to the Portland Trail Blazers, Knecht started to look like a real possibility.

Inside the Lakers’ draft room, Knecht’s fall didn’t make sense. In preparation for the draft, L.A. had each of its scouts rank their top 100 prospects and aggregated those lists on their board. Knecht was in everyone’s top 10. What were they missing?

Pelinka called Schwartz and spoke to Knecht’s team with Excel.

“It was like, ‘You’re giving me your word?'” Pelinka told ESPN. “I had to do a trust call of, ‘There’s no red flags, right? You’re giving us your word.’ And that’s when it started to unfold.”

Meanwhile, back in Knoxville, Vols assistant coach Gregg Polinsky was fielding similar inquiries.

“I can’t tell you how many teams were calling,” Polinsky told ESPN. “‘What’s the story? Is it medical?'”

Looking back at it now, Polinsky thinks Knecht’s draft stock plunged for two reasons: Teams were put off by his age — already 23 after two seasons of junior college, two seasons at Northern Colorado and a fifth collegiate season at Tennessee — and by his interviews.

“I have great respect for my colleagues,” said Polinsky, who spent more than 20 years in the NBA in the scouting and pro personnel departments of the Nets and Pistons. “If you hit more than 50%, you’ve done a good job. The draft is damn hard to do.”

But in Knecht’s case, he found the concerns about his interviews to be preposterous. “He’s focused on basketball,” Polinsky said. “If you think he is going to woo you with his worldly nature or talk about how he speaks three languages, think again. He doesn’t care about that. DK, he’s a baller, simply stated.”

Tennessee assistant coach Rod Clark, for his part, thinks Knecht’s honesty might have hurt him.

“I guess some team asked him if he liked to read, and he told them no,” Clark told ESPN. “And I’m like, what does that have to do with playing basketball? All he’s doing is just being himself and telling the truth, like, ‘No, I don’t like to read.’ Which, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of people that don’t like to read.

“But that’s him. Some people have met him and they’re like, ‘Yeah, he doesn’t talk much, right?’ And then people that know him are like, ‘Man, that dude’s funny as hell.’ He’s one of those guys that if he doesn’t know you, he has a real guard up and his antennas are up and he’s trying to feel you out to see what you’re about.”

At 9:42 p.m., the Miami Heat selected Kel’el Ware at No. 15. Seven minutes later, the Philadelphia 76ers selected Jared McCain at No. 16.

The Lakers had their guy.

“Literally everybody was ecstatic,” a team source told ESPN. “Usually there’s a couple pissed-off people after draft night because sometimes it’s a tough decision made. … And it was like everybody was just happy. Nobody was pissed off. Nobody was even close to being like, ‘Well what about this?’ It was like zero discussion, zero argument. Everybody was just happy. High-fives, celebrating. … Let’s go.”

JAXSON HAYES WAS receiving treatment on his ankle in the bowels of Crypto.com Arena, craning his neck to stare up at a television screen. It was Nov. 19, and before him was the Lakers rookie igniting the team, and the crowd, against the Jazz.

“I’m watching and it’s like a second or two delay on the TV,” Hayes told ESPN. “So, you see him get ready to shoot a shot, then you hear everyone go crazy [in the arena], and then you see it go in.

“So it was like, ‘Man, he made another one!’ You could tell [from the training room] it was just insane in there.”

Knecht connected on all six shots he took in the third quarter, scoring 21 points in the final 3:29 of the period, sending the crowd into a tizzy. He finished with 37 on 12-for-16 shooting, tying a rookie record for most 3-pointers in a game with nine — a total Redick reached just once in 940 career games as a player.

After Knecht made four straight 3s, Utah’s Cody Williams tried to turn the nozzle off by crowding him beyond the arc. No matter. Knecht got the 20-year-old Williams off balance and was able to draw a foul, earning three free throws. He made all three.

It wasn’t lost on Knecht that the Jazz selected Williams seven spots earlier in the draft. He might not read books, but he has memorized the names of the 16 players drafted ahead of him. “Every team, everything,” Knecht said.

On the court, he continued to expose Utah’s draft analysts as he sprinted from spot to spot for catch-and-shoot treys — evidenced by the mere 11 dribbles he took in the quarter, according to Second Spectrum data.

It was the type of heater the Dallas Mavericks’ Klay Thompson became famous for when he was with the Golden State Warriors — scoring 43 points on just four dribbles in 2019 and 60 points on 11 dribbles in 2016.

Thompson was one of those shooters L.A. pined for, and James would have taken a pay cut to sign as a free agent this summer, sources told ESPN.

Through the first six weeks of the season, Thompson is averaging 13.2 points while shooting 38.3% for Dallas (36.8% from 3) and making $15.9 million. Knecht is averaging 11.9 points on 48% (42.9% from 3) and making $3.8 million.

Other than Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, whom L.A. traded away in the Russell Westbrook deal three years ago, no designated shooter has performed this well alongside James with the Lakers. And many — Reggie Bullock, Mike Muscala, Svi Mykhailiuk, Troy Daniels, Danny Green, Markieff Morris, Wesley Matthews, Ben McLemore, Wayne Ellington, Kendrick Nunn, Malik Beasley and Gabe Vincent — have tried.

In the seasons that followed the Caldwell-Pope deal, L.A. has finished in the bottom half of the league in 3-pointers made per game (18th, 24th and 24th, respectively) while perimeter shooting has become increasingly synonymous with postseason success in the NBA. Redick was brought in to, among other tasks, correct that trajectory. The Lakers are 22nd in 3-point makes this season, and 17th in 3-point percentage (35.6).

Six days after he got the job, it was as if his playing career was reincarnated through the rookie, a fresh vessel for Redick to transfer his shooting knowledge. The coach and player have discussed intricacies such as coming off a screen with two steps to power into a shot versus using a hop, which Knecht prefers. “It’s like a match made in heaven,” Clark said.

And Knecht has leveled up once again, going from 38.1% on 3s in his final year at Northern Colorado, to 39.7% at Tennessee, to 43.9% in the NBA on a similar volume. He’s making 2.4 triples a game for the Lakers; he averaged 2.6 for the Volunteers.

“He’s been shooting the crap out that ball,” Hayes said.

Knecht hasn’t forgotten about that first misstep in Memphis. And the Lakers haven’t forgotten his response to it. They’ve gone back to him in the starting lineup, with Redick noting that the offensive instincts shared by James, Anthony Davis and Austin Reaves naturally amplify Knecht’s skill set.

“Teams passed up on me and the Lakers thought they got the steal of the draft,” Knecht said.

“And they did.”