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After months of anticipation, the Lakers finally made the necessary move to become compliant with the league’s roster rules.
The team waived Dalton Knecht on Monday ahead of the league’s 2 p.m. deadline to trim their roster from 16 to 15 players signed to standard contracts.
The Lakers have been needing to trim their roster since signing Matisse Thybulle to a veteran’s minimum contract in late July.
And after nearly three months of deliberation, they decided to part ways with the third-year wing whose role with the team has diminished over the last couple of years.
The Lakers selected Knecht with the No. 17 pick in the 2024, with the former Tennessee Volunteer making a big splash early on as a rookie.
He was in the rotation from the start of the 2024-25 season, stepping into the starting lineup in mid-November amid injuries — which produced the best stretch of his brief NBA career: Knecht averaged 18.9 points and 4.9 rebounds in the final nine games of November 2024 (nine starts).
Even when he hit a shooting slump in January and December, the 6-foot-5 wing was still getting consistent playing time as a part of the rotation.
It looked like Knecht was going to come out of the slump after scoring 14 points on 6-of-9 shooting in the Lakers’ win over the Clippers on Feb. 4, 2025.
But his career hasn’t been the same since.
The Lakers included him in the trade for Mark Williams that was rescinded, and Knecht’s playing time for the Lakers wasn’t the same after he returned to the team.
That was still true during his second season with the Lakers in 2025-26: He played 553 total minutes during the regular season across 54 games after recording 1,494 minutes in 78 regular-season games as a rookie.
“The biggest thing is the team changed,” coach JJ Redick said last week when asked where things went wrong for Knecht. “The team changed. The needs changed, the fit changed. I think he got better as a player over the last two years. I think each guy has, particularly last year, each guy got plenty of opportunities with the amount of injuries we had. So I just think coming into this year, we added a lot of wings and he’s in a tough spot right now.”
Knecht averaged just 2.8 points (11.8 minutes per game) in four of the Lakers’ five preseason games.