D’Angelo Russell broke several guy codes when he recorded Nick Young admitting to cheating on his fiancee Iggy Azalea. It was expected that this would cause a serious rift amongst the team and now sources say it has; the Lakers are freezing out the young rookie.
“Right now,” one source said, “they’re handling it by isolating him.”
Said one team insider: “This was a prank gone wrong and a mistake by [Russell], and he has to be held accountable, but I would hope he isn’t overly criticized for it.”
The emergence of the video, sources said, has been the talk of the locker room for the past several days and has led to a tangible strain between Russell and some teammates.
At a recent breakfast meeting, one source said, no Laker would sit with Russell at his table. The source added that, in another instance, Russell came into the locker room and sat next to guard Lou Williams, who got up and walked away.
“It’s bad,” one team source told ESPN.com‘s Ramona Shelburne. “It’s about as bad as it can get. There were trust issues already. Now there’s no trust.”
I’m still confused as to why he would record that private conversation and how it got to a gossip site. It’s going to take a LONG time before teammates trust him again, if ever.
