The Los Angeles Lakers have four players from their 2019-20 roster that have player options for the 2020-21 season. It’s already been reported that Rajon Rondo and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope will be opting out of their deals to secure larger salaries with either the Lakers or other teams. The other two players are Avery Bradley and JaVale McGee, as no news has come out about the two players’ plans. That has changed for Bradley, as the following has been reported by Shams Charania and The Athletic.
Lakers guard Avery Bradley tells @TheAthleticNBA @Stadium he is changing representation and plans to sign with agent Charles Briscoe. He is evaluating whether to decline his $5M player option.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) November 12, 2020
Avery Bradley quietly had a pretty good personal comeback season for the Lakers, as he was able to play pretty much all of the season after many years of injury-ridden campaigns. He started for the Lakers in nearly every game that he was active, providing the Lakers with some decent perimeter defense and some random first quarter scoring bursts as Bradley showed he was deadly from the mid-range in many games leading up to the pandemic. Obviously, Bradley never played another game for the Lakers after the season was suspended in March as he opted out of the Orlando bubble due to health concerns for him and his family.
If Avery Bradley opts out of his 2020-21 player option worth $5 million, that means him and his new agent believe that he’d be due for a higher payday with the Lakers, or even another team. The idea of that is questionable, as the Lakers did just fine without him in route to their 2020 NBA Finals championship. In addition, there isn’t much money to go around the NBA with many teams with limited cap space in a year where the cap did not increase due to financial struggles from COVID-19.
One last thing of note is that Charles Briscoe represents Dwight Howard as well (according to RealGM). It’s been reported previously that there’s mutual interest between the Lakers and Howard on a return to L.A. for the veteran.
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