By James Harley

The Los Angeles Lakers have been in the news many times winning NBA championships. Once again the Lakers find themselves in the news again, except this time, it isn’t because they won.

A couple weeks ago, Lakers guard D’Angelo Russell secretly videotaped his teammate, forward Nick Young, in a hotel room. In the video that was eventually released, Young admits that he cheated on his fiancé Iggy Azalea, who’s a famous rapper and pop star singer.

Since the release of the video, Russell has taken major heat, not only from media and fans, but from nearly every one of his teammates. There have been numerous reports that many of his teammates have worked together to ignore Russell completely, which has noticeably affected the team chemistry with an already struggling team. In the stretch of games since the incident, the Lakers have lost seven of their last eight, including a 48 point loss to the Jazz, the Laker’s worst loss in franchise history.

The intent was supposedly for Russell to get back at Young for an earlier prank, but did Russell’s “prank” go too far? Did Russell break the bro code?

The main idea is that Russell did the wrong thing, to rat out someone he calls a teammate and a bother. There is no question that what Young did was wrong, but in no situation should someone ever do what Russell did to him. The best thing Russell could’ve done was just tell Young to confess to his fiancé, and if he didn’t, well that’s none of his business.

The other part of it was Russell getting all the hate. What he did was wrong and childish, but obviously his intentions were never to cause this much drama, based on the way he has responded to the criticism.

Things have been bad in the locker room for Russell though. From teammates avoiding sitting by him, even all the way up to his teammates not giving him the ball during an actual game, Russell certainly couldn’t catch a break for a while.

For the Lakers organization, it’s certainly been an embarrassment. They didn’t do too much to change the situation. What could they have done?

Even though there wasn’t much for the Lakers to do, I personally think they should have suspended Russell and Young. The drama of all this should never affect the flow of a professional game. The Lakers should have also never allowed teammates to shut out Russell like they did; it seriously hurt the team chemistry more than it would’ve leaving Russell out of the games.

After all the fallout, the Lakers should move on completely from this incident. Having Nick Young on the team this season is no longer helping the rebuilding process in Los Angeles. The Lakers best option now is to waive Young and find a better and younger player that can fulfill the potential of making the Lakers better. The other thing the Lakers should do is make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Make sure the players can all end up being on good terms, and if they are not, move on from them and try rebuilding with other players.

After this incident, the Lakers have a lot of work to do with rebuilding, D’Angelo Russell has a lot of trust to build with his teammates, and Nick Young has a lot of work to do to keep his relationship with Iggy Azalea moving forward, even though she’s already forgiven him supposedly. It’s now up to everyone in the Laker’s organization to make sure Laker fans can have something good to cheer about.