How the Lakers arrived at letting Malik Beasley, Mo Bamba walk

The Lakers have maintained all offseason long they intend to run it back. Things changed Thursday. How did that come to be?

Mere hours before Jake Fischer of Yahoo Sports reported the Lakers would be waiving Mo Bamba and also not picking up Malik Beasley’s team option, I’m not going to lie, I was under the impression the idea was to bring both back. I didn’t know for sure, but that was what the Lakers were making it seem like they were going to do.

Over the last few days, though, momentum kept growing behind the idea of the Lakers signing Bruce Brown away from the Denver Nuggets and, the thought became that if the Lakers did go down this path and said goodbye to both Bamba and Beasley, it would be because of intel they’d received they had a good chance at Brown.

So, apparently, they received that intel and, for now, Beasley and Bamba are former Lakers. Things happen quickly this time of year and this is a pretty perfect example.

Thursday morning, fellow Substacker (and, more importantly, fellow Titan) Marc Stein made it seem pretty unlikely the Lakers would be real players for Bruce Brown. Moments later, Jovan Buha of The Athletic reported the Lakers had growing confidence they would be landing Brown.

Technically speaking, both can be correct. The Lakers can have confidence they’re signing Brown and then might also miss out on him if he takes an offer from, say, the Indiana Pacers, above the $12.4M the Lakers can pay him. Let’s hope that isn’t the case, as it was with them and Kawhi Leonard a few years back.

Given what I knew about the situation, I thought Stein had it right. The Lakers have maintained publicly and privately that the plan was to run it back and, I’d been told that included Beasley and Bamba. So either I had it incorrect (altogether possible) or something changed in the hours between recording The Lounge this afternoon and the Lakers making the decision to part ways with their two most tradable contracts.

To the best of my knowledge, it’s the latter. I’m told the Lakers pulled the trigger on the NTMLE plan because they’re confident in their ability to bring in Brown or their contingency plans if they don’t.