The Los Angeles Lakers’ trip to Slovenia now has a headcount, and it is about as close to unanimous as the rules of the NBA allow.
According to Marc Stein of The Stein Line, 16 of the 17 players on the Lakers’ roster have committed to attend the four-day minicamp Luka Doncic is hosting in his home country later this month.
The only player who will not make the trip is rookie Cameron Carr, and his absence has nothing to do with his own preferences. Stein reported that the No. 24 pick is bound by a league obligation that happens to fall at exactly the wrong time.
“League sources say it would have been 17 of 17 if just-drafted swingman Cameron Carr wasn’t required to participate in an official NBA rookie orientation that conflicts with what Dončić is calling a ‘team bonding trip,'” wrote Stein.
For a franchise that has spent the last month absorbing the departure of LeBron James and rebuilding its roster around Doncic, the attendance sheet doubles as the first measurable answer to a question that has hung over the offseason: Would a locker room full of newcomers actually follow the new franchise centerpiece? On the evidence of one voluntary August trip, the answer arrived quickly.
Why Cameron Carr is the only Laker staying home
Carr’s conflict is a scheduling collision rather than a snub in either direction. The NBA runs an orientation program for its incoming rookies, and the league typically stages that rookie transition program in late August — squarely on top of the window Doncic has carved out in Ljubljana. Attendance at the league program is not optional for draft picks, which leaves the 21-year-old guard as the roster’s lone forced absence.
There is a mild irony in the timing. Orientation exists to integrate rookies into NBA life, and in this specific case, it is the one thing standing between a rookie and the most valuable integration exercise his own team will run all summer.
The Lakers open training camp in late September, so Carr’s first extended run alongside the full group will now wait for the formal calendar rather than the informal one.
What the No. 24 pick is missing
The absence stings more because Carr is precisely the kind of player a bonding trip is built for. The Lakers moved up to take him at No. 24 in June’s draft, betting on a wing who turned a stalled start at Tennessee into one of the best breakout seasons in the country.
At Baylor last season, Carr averaged 18.9 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.6 assists and 1.3 blocks per game while shooting 49.4 percent from the field, numbers that ranked him fourth in the Big 12 in scoring and earned him a spot on the conference’s All-Big 12 third team.
He carried that form into July, averaging 18.0 points per game across four Summer League appearances. The profile is a clean fit next to Doncic: a 6-foot-5 athlete who scores off the catch, attacks closeouts and protects the rim from the wing, which is exactly the archetype that tends to thrive on the receiving end of Doncic’s passing.
None of that changes because of one missed trip, and the practical cost of four days is small. The symbolic cost is the part worth noting.
Every other new Laker will land in Los Angeles this fall already holding a shared reference point — the workouts, the dinners, the golf, the inside jokes formed in Ljubljana — and the youngest player on the roster will be the only one starting from zero.
Rookies typically fight uphill for belonging anyway, and Carr will now do it while being the single member of the team who was somewhere else when the group became a group.
16 yeses is the real story
The aggregation cycle has treated Carr’s absence as the headline, but the more consequential number is the other one. 16 players said yes to a voluntary overseas trip in the middle of August, organized by a teammate most of them have never played a regular-season game with.
The committed list runs through Austin Reaves, Walker Kessler and Bronny James, along with returning players Dalton Knecht, Jarred Vanderbilt and Jake LaRavia and offseason additions Quentin Grimes, Collin Sexton, Ziaire Williams, Matisse Thybulle and Sandro Mamukelashvili.
That is not a small ask. August is the one stretch of the NBA calendar players fully own, and Doncic is asking a largely rebuilt roster to spend part of it on a trip whose itinerary, first reported by ESPN’s Dave McMenamin, blends real work with deliberate downtime.
“The itinerary will include workouts, golf and some Ljubljana tourism and bonding,” McMenamin reported.
The full-roster response also lands one day after Doncic gave the trip its final piece of context. In a written message to fans on Monday, the Lakers star said he is now 100 percent healthy after the hamstring injury that ended his season, meaning the man throwing the minicamp confirmed he is physically whole roughly 24 hours before the league learned his entire team took him up on the invitation.
Recovery and leadership have been the twin questions of his first Lakers offseason as the unambiguous franchise player, and both trend lines just moved in the same direction in the same week.
It is the kind of buy-in the organization could not have manufactured on its own. Front offices can trade for talent and coaches can schedule practices, but a superstar convincing 16 teammates to fly to his hometown in their vacation month is culture arriving from the only place it can actually come from.
What it sets up before training camp
When the Lakers gather formally in late September, they will do so as a team that has already logged four days together — every rotation player, every returner, every newcomer except one rookie whose absence the entire locker room understands was involuntary.
For a roster carrying this much turnover into a season with this much riding on chemistry, that head start is the entire point of the exercise. The remaining questions are the ones only games can answer, starting with how quickly the new pieces mesh around a healthy Doncic and how the franchise’s first post-LeBron season takes shape.
What the attendance sheet settles now is something more foundational: when the new face of the Lakers asked his team to show up, everyone who was allowed to said yes, and the only holdout needed a league mandate to keep him away.
