Los Angeles Lakers forward Dalton Knecht, who was selected by the storied franchise with the No. 17 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, turned heads with a strong 2024-25 regular season in Los Angeles.
He played in all but four of the team’s 82 regular-season contests and averaged 9.1 points per game while shooting 37.6 percent from 3-point range.
However, since the end of the regular season, there hasn’t been much to write home about regarding Knecht.
He hardly saw the floor in Los Angeles’ first-round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves in the 2025 NBA Playoffs, and he’s also on the heels of a very forgettable Summer League stint. Across six games played with the Lakers in Summer League, he averaged just 11.7 points per contest and shot an abysmal 32.1 percent from the field and 23.7 percent from deep.
It was recently reported by Lakers insider Jovan Buha that Knecht is “no longer worth a first-round valuation.”
“The chatter in Vegas about Dalton Knecht was not good,” Buha said. “And after we recorded, Dalton played again and he had another rough game. So, it’s not been — Summer League has not helped Dalton Knecht’s stock, and I don’t think at this point he is valued as a first-round pick in terms of an asset evaluation. That was what I heard in Vegas from talking to multiple people — non-Lakers people — just gauging what would you give for Dalton Knecht, or if the Lakers are putting Dalton Knecht in a trade, what is he worth? And the feedback I got was no longer worth a first-round valuation.”
It’s hard to predict what exactly Knecht’s role with the Lakers as a sophomore in the coming 2025-26 season will look like after he looked out of sorts in Summer League.
Lakers fans might have a difficult time wrapping their head around the fact that the same player who was ice-cold in Summer League and a non-factor in the 2025 NBA Playoffs tied a rookie single-game record for most made 3s early on in his maiden season.
He buried a whopping nine 3-pointers in a contest against the Utah Jazz and went off for 37 points in that game.
The Lakers are certainly hoping that Knecht’s lackluster play after the 2024-25 regular season marks just a long slump for him. They’d love for him to get back to scoring the ball from deep at an efficient rate in the 2025-26 season.
If his shooting woes persist into the coming season, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Knecht finds himself out of head coach J.J. Redick’s rotation. It could prove to be imperative to his future with the Lakers that he regains his shooting touch.
