It’s hard to imagine Summer League having played out much worse than it did for Dalton Knecht across San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Entering the summer with expectations of excelling at the level most second-year players do, Knecht fell well, well short of those marks. Aside from the finale of the California Classic where he caught fire in the fourth quarter, Knecht struggled mightily throughout Summer League.
Even accounting for that aforementioned game against the Spurs where he finished with 25 points on 9-18 shooting overall and 4-8 shooting from range, Knecht finished the summer shooting just 32.1% from the field and 23.7% from the 3-point line.
Outside of that Spurs performance, he shot 5-30 (16.7%) from the 3-point line across five games. And while he was never much of a playmaker or known for setting up teammates, his nine turnovers compared to eight assists stuck out even more amidst his shooting woes.
All of that leads to a very fair question: how badly did he hurt his trade value this summer?
It’s been a rocky, awkward road the Lakers and Dalton have navigated together since the team tried to trade him last season. There’s a looming sense of when, not if, the Lakers try to trade him again. But after this summer, is there much of a market left?
Well, according to Dan Woike of The Athletic, it might not have been impacted all that much. During his recent mailbag piece, Woike touched on Knecht briefly.
“I won’t go too in-depth on Knecht, other than to say that I think NBA evaluators haven’t put much stock into his summer-league performance.”
It makes sense that there wouldn’t be a lot of weight placed on Summer League because Summer League is a really odd setting. It’s rosters being thrown together in a matter of hours and players playing for themselves as much as anything else.
It’s hard, then, to have too many drastic takeaways from Summer League, whether positive or negative, though, admittedly, it’s a lot easier to overlook the bad games than the good ones.
Ultimately, teams aren’t going to look away from Knecht because of Summer League, but it’s also not like he was playing all that well at the end of the season. After peaking in November, Knecht struggled more and more as the season went on. His trade value was already dipping well before Summer League started.
The challenge for Knecht, then, will be turning that around. His rookie year was about as tumultuous as they come but with things looking settling heading into the season, can he bounce back and look more like the player that was in the starting lineup during the regular season and less like the one who struggled mightily in Las Vegas.
For a number of reasons, the Lakers certainly hope so.