Roster-Deadline Shockers: Lakers Waive Dalton Knecht, Bucks Waive Kevin Porter Jr.

Every October, the NBA’s roster deadline quietly ends a few dozen dreams. Most of the names are camp invites and two-way hopefuls nobody outside their families could pick out of a lineup. Monday was not that kind of cutdown day. By the time the league’s 5 p.m. Eastern deadline arrived, two of the most recognizable young names in the league were on the waiver wire: Dalton Knecht, the Los Angeles Lakers’ first-round pick just two drafts ago, and Kevin Porter Jr., who put up near-star numbers for the Milwaukee Bucks last season. ESPN’s Shams Charania reported both moves.

Knecht: the pick who never got his footing back

It is worth remembering how Knecht arrived. The Lakers took him 17th overall in the 2024 draft after a single, spectacular season at Tennessee, where he won SEC Player of the Year and consensus first-team All-American honors — the highest-drafted player of the Rick Barnes era. As a rookie he looked like a steal in flashes, averaging 9.1 points and 2.8 rebounds, and detonating for a career-high 37 points against the Utah Jazz in a game that briefly made him the most exciting young Laker in the building.

Then came February 2025, and the trade that wasn’t. The Lakers agreed to send Knecht to Charlotte in the deal for center Mark Williams — and then rescinded it after Williams failed his physical. Knecht came back to a locker room that had, in effect, already said goodbye, and by most accounts he never quite found his rhythm again. His second season shrank to 4.2 points in 10.2 minutes a night, his shooting too streaky to trust and his defense, as USA Today put it in its analysis of the move, a liability. With the roster overhauled this summer and wings with size stacked in front of him, the Lakers faced a clean choice for their final spot. They chose the roster spot — and, per USA Today’s reporting, Bronny James stayed while Knecht went.

Porter Jr.: the numbers say one thing, the knee says another

If the Knecht cut is a story about fit, the Porter cut is a story about availability. For the Bucks last season, Porter Jr. averaged 17.4 points, 5.2 rebounds, 7.4 assists and 2.2 steals per game whenever he was healthy enough to play — genuinely excellent production. The problem is the first clause of that sentence. Injuries limited him to 38 appearances, and right knee surgery in April 2026 ended his regular season early. Milwaukee, staring at a perimeter logjam and a hard deadline, decided it could not carry the uncertainty.

Porter’s route to Milwaukee was already a winding one — a stint with PAOK in Greece in 2024, then a return to the NBA with the Los Angeles Clippers, then a February 2025 move to the Bucks. Talent has never been the question with him. The question, as ever, is whether the next team gets the 38-game version or the durable one. NBC Sports flagged Sacramento as a team to watch on a waiver claim, with the Kings suddenly in need after Ben Simmons suffered a season-ending Achilles injury on Sunday.

Nobody wanted to do this — the trade market just said no

The detail that ties Monday together comes from Marc Stein: the Bucks, Grizzlies and Lakers all pursued trades in recent days hoping to solve their roster crunches with a deal instead of a cut, and none of them could find a palatable match. Memphis ended up waiving Walter Clayton Jr. to beat the same deadline. That is the unglamorous truth of cutdown economics — as USA Today noted in the Lakers’ case, rival teams have little reason to give up assets for a player they know they can claim for nothing days later. So the waiver wire, not the trade wire, did the work.

There is also the matter of what the deadline says about where these franchises are. The Lakers carried 16 guaranteed contracts through the preseason knowing one player they liked was going to be cut loose for nothing, and they spent the weekend working the phones anyway, including reported talks with Milwaukee about a Knecht deal built around backup center Jericho Sims that never crossed the finish line. Milwaukee, meanwhile, chose certainty at the end of its bench over a guard who was one of its best players whenever he was healthy enough to suit up. Those are the decisions of teams that believe their rotations are already set — and that October is too early to carry a maybe.

What happens next for both players is genuinely open. Knecht is 25, a proven college scorer with one 37-point NBA night on tape; players like that usually get a second look somewhere, even if it starts as a two-way contract. Porter, when healthy, is a starting-caliber guard, and a claim feels more likely than not given the Kings’ situation. For the Lakers, the page turns fast: they open the 2026-27 season on Wednesday against the Golden State Warriors, and the Knecht chapter closes as a two-year experiment that produced one unforgettable night and a trade that fell apart.

It was not the only deadline-day roster news around the league — see our midday story on Phoenix’s cuts — and the title picture those rosters are chasing is broken down in our GM survey on the 2026-27 title race. The season itself tips off with an experiment: our look at the Celtics-Pistons daytime opener. For everything else on a busy Monday, the Sports front has it covered.