D'Angelo Russell has a big mess to clean up
Long before these young and dumb Los Angeles Lakers took an even more sophomoric turn than normal, 30-year-old Nick Young stood at his locker and joked about rookie guard D’Angelo Russell’s failing hygiene.
“He’s a little stinky-boy,” Young said with his trademark smile after a Feb. 4 game. “He don’t really know how to wash up, so that’s where we’ve got to teach him.”
The smiles have disappeared now, though, and the 20-year-old Russell has about as good a chance of getting this latest stink off of him as the Lakers do of making a late playoff push.
If there is one off-the-court thing for which a professional athlete cannot afford to be known, it is snitching. Say what you want about the flawed reasoning behind unwritten rules and informal codes of conduct, but this – like it or not – is the kind of stain that may never wash out. And for Russell, who not only videotaped Young admitting his own romantic infidelities during a hotel room conversation between teammates but shared the evidence on Snapchat to what he supposedly thought was a private audience, this is no small social media crime.
To put it all in fitting parlance … SMDH.
Reports: Lakers players shun D'Angelo Russell over Nick Young video
In these days in which the focus was supposed to be solely on Kobe Bryant’s legendary career winding down, there’s now this bit of unsavory and unavoidable context: 12 years ago, it was Bryant who provided the most well-known cautionary tale on this front. When Bryant, as part of the 2003 sexual assault case in Vail Colo., was found to be loose-lipped about teammate Shaquille O’Neal’s extramarital endeavors during his interactions with Eagle County, Colo. detectives, it was the kind of revelation that had a serious ripple effect on his reputation.
Years later, after the case against him was dropped and a civil suit was settled out of court with no admission of guilt from Bryant, agents of prominent NBA players would still cite the O’Neal subplot as the sort of sin that inspired their clients to steer clear of Laker Land. The natural question regarding Russell now, in addition to the one about his teammates and the damage he has done to their collective trust, is whether this will make him a pariah to his peers around the league at the worst possible time.
As if concerns about their young core developing too slowly or the disastrous season in which they’ve lost 59 or 74 games weren’t enough.
Before all of this, Russell had finally been heading in the right direction. Three months of fits and starts, that stretch of struggle in which the No. 2 pick out of Ohio State consistently drew the ire of coach Byron Scott, had been followed with real progress.
Trust, from Scott on down, had been a central theme to his early growth. And this – a 36-game span from Jan. 7 to March 27 in which he averaged 14.9 points (44.4% shooting overall, 38.8% from three-point range), 3.4 assists and 2.7 rebounds per game – was a strong sign that, in the end, he could be the player that had top executive Jim Buss declaring the Lakers had “turned the corner” going into this season.
Russell is expected to address reporters before the Lakers’ home game Wednesday against the Miami Heat, at which time he’ll likely apologize and explain how this was nothing more than a prank gone wrong. But the more relevant reaction won’t be heard until July, when the Lakers are estimated to have a league-high $66 million in salary cap space and the only thing they can’t afford is for Russell’s immature moment to cost them dearly.
It’s about time Russell learns how to wash up, all right. But that lesson will have to come the hard way now, with no help from Young or anyone else in that Lakers locker room coming anytime soon.