Why the Lakers missing out on Darren Collison is a big loss

Swing and a miss.

The Los Angeles Lakers sat back and watched their fellow Staples Center residents, the Clippers, make a big splash at Thursday’s trade deadline: a trade for Marcus Morris, which didn’t cost them much, giving the Clips an additional scorer for the playoff run.

The plan, it seemed, was for the Lakers to grab the previously-retired Darren Collison and sign him for a late-season run when he could help with ball-handling and shooting (funny enough, both the Clippers and Lakers enter Monday with the same percentage from distance at 36.3 percent). Rajon Rondo is up-and-down, and although Avery Bradley has emerged in a big way in February, Collison would have been a huge help from an experience perspective and he could have boosted the Lakers’ second unit with shooting (he’s a career 39.4 percent from beyond the arc).

Although it looked like the Lakers were the favorite — heck, he sat with team president and owner Jeannie Buss at a recent game — it appears Collison isn’t coming out of retirement for anyone:

So … now what?

In the middle of buyout season, it looks like a name like Dion Waiters could be a nominee, which makes Kendrick Perkins happy:

The problem is that Waiters is a much bigger uncertainty. He’s shown flashes of being the scorer we know he can be, but he’s not as prolific from distance and he’s coming off a volatile end of his tenure in Miami when he was  suspended multiple times by the Heat before he was shipped off to Memphis in the Andre Iguodala trade and waived.

Collison is a more dependable name. But the Lakers could wait instead of grabbing Waiters right away, yet the other options — Isaiah Thomas, Tyler Johnson, Jeff Green, as of right now — either aren’t the right fits or are sub-optimal options.

It’s a big swing and a miss for a franchise looking in its rear-view mirror an seeing the Clippers just three games behind them for the top spot in the West.