Lakers News: Executives Speculate About Fates Of Lonnie Walker, Malik Beasley
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Los Angeles Lakers shooting guards Malik Beasley and Lonnie Walker IV have had a weirdly interconnected usage history during their shared time in LA. Walker had been the team's starter, either at shooting guard or small forward, prior to Beasley's arrival on the club via trade. Beasley quickly replaced him as a starter, and Walker fell out of the team's rotation entirely at the close of the regular season. Beasley was shifted to a reserve role to end the year (in favor of the better two-way player Austin Reaves), and then was brutally bad as a shooter in the playoffs. Walker, meanwhile, stepped up, taking his spot off the bench in the second round and having some major heat-checking scoring runs.
Though Beasley may have had the better pedigree heading into the year, Walker did get the better of him at the end. Now, however, Los Angeles has some big decisions to make about both men's futures.
Sean Deveney of Heavy.com chatted with executives from rival front offices about their anticipated respective fates.
Los Angeles possesses a $16.5 million player option on Beasley for 2023-24. One would expect that the Lakers would opt out of the Beasley experience after he played himself right out of the Lakers' rotation by the last two games of LA's first round playoff series against the Memphis Grizzlies. However, locking in Beasley's money this summer makes sense from a bigger-picture perspective, one executive reasons.
"He can be a contributor, really on any team,” the exec explained. “The expectation is they’ll keep him. He can be a good trade piece if you need one. It’s just, if the tax is a big worry, he’d be the easy piece to move off of.”
So the retention of Beasley would be done in service of using him in a larger deal to match money, potentially.
Clubs will probably look past the 26-year-old swingman's brutal playoff averages of three points on .294/.269/1.000 shooting splits, in favor of his regular season averages of 11.1 points, 3.3 rebounds and 1.2 assists (albeit against 1.2 turnovers).
Though he was fairly inefficient for his position in his shooting from the floor overall and from the charity stripe, teams will doubtless zero in on one very critical skill: his volume three-point shooting at a respectable conversion rate. For his career, he's averaging 5.8 triple attempts on 37.8% shooting. In his 26 regular season games with LA (he started 14 before being demoted in favor of Reaves), he connected on 35.3% of his 7.2 tries a night.
Walker, who eventually supplanted both Beasley and Troy Brown Jr. in Darvin Ham's playoff rotation, is an unrestricted free agent after inking a one-year, $6.5 million deal with the Lakers last summer.
"I can’t see how they can pay him [what he could make on another team], he is probably a goner,” another executive noted.
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