The Lakers Did Not Need to Draft Bronny James

Doug Gottlieb: "You're allowed to draft Bronny James. You're allowed to have nepotism. But to carry on a charade that he was going to go to Australia or that someone else was interested was ridiculous. The part that is embarrassing for the Lakers is - why did you have to draft him? Nobody was going to draft Bronny James. Everybody knew he was going to LA. You could still sign him as an undrafted free agent. If the whole idea was that you didn't want to embarrass him, the market had spoken. If you thought in the next 5 picks he was going to get selected, that's fine, but no one was going to take him. Everyone knows. And yet you do that, and you carry on the charade. It's true, nepotism occurs throughout the NBA, and part of that is a good thing. But to act like if nepotism occurs elsewhere, then nepotism here is fine, no. Two wrongs don't make a right."

Dan Beyer: "There are a lot of teams that would draft someone, stash them because the player wouldn't come over from Europe, and then they'd be available in the next 2-3 years. That may actually be a better plan for Bronny James' actual pro prospects than to be an actual threat for other teams to think that they'd be, God forbid, missing out on a second round pick. It was idiotic to think that would be a possibility. Hardly anybody gets anything out of second round picks. There are more failures than there are success rates, and to make it think that it was an actual threat made it that much more ridiculous that people were actually taking it seriously."

Doug Gottlieb and Dan Beyer, in for Dan Patrick, react to the Lakers selecting Bronny James with the 55th overall pick. The guys break down why Rich Paul's threats of Bronny leaving for Australia should not have been taken seriously by anyone, given that the Lakers could have actually passed on drafting LeBron's son and simply signed him after the draft, given that it was an open secret across the league that Bronny would end up in Los Angeles.