Swaggy has a player option of $5.7 million next season, if he opts into that while the Lakers would still be on the hook for his salary, they could stretch out the payment and release him.
They might have thought about doing that before the D’Angelo video, but now it seems like a foregone conclusion according to ESPN.
Chances are Russell won’t be traded this offseason, but there’s a strong possibility the Lakers roster will be overhauled. That could include the team parting ways with Young, which could give Russell a fresh start with the same team. The story, however, won’t go away.
“Fortunately for D’Angelo Russell, that team is in such flux there will be a tremendous amount of roster turnover, and that could help him a little bit,” said ESPN NBA analyst Tim Legler, who played for 10 seasons. “But even new guys coming in are going to know about this event. It’s a shady thing to do. People can write it off as immaturity, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think it speaks to your integrity as a person and your overall trustworthiness. It’s going to be a difficult thing for him to shed. I don’t know how you recover from something like this.”
Legler makes a good point in that anyone who comes to the Lakers will have in the back of their mind what D’Angelo did to Swaggy.
It will make it hard for D’Angelo to be a leader on the court, but if he plays well and shows people that something like this will never happen again, he can recover. He can never fully recover, but it will just become a footnote in his career.