Ty Lawson has had a few off-the-court issues during his NBA career, so whenever he does something like miss a team flight, it’s going to set off some alarms. That’s exactly what happened on Friday, when Lawson wasn’t on an airplane that the Sacramento Kings took to Kentucky, causing him to miss a preseason game on Saturday.
No one knows exactly what happened, but TMZ managed to get a few details about the incident. Lawson was apparently at a Las Vegas nightclub with two of his teammates, Ben McLemore and Willie Cauley-Stein, along with boxer Adrien Broner. This happened after a Kings preseason game in Vegas, and the following morning, McLemore and Cauley-Stein managed to get onto the flight.
Although he missed out, his agent told TMZ that Lawson reached out to the front office about missing the flight and they granted him permission. This is an interesting development, because on Sunday, reports made it sound like the team had no idea what was going on.
Kings guard Ty Lawson will meet with team officials to explain why he missed Friday’s flight from Las Vegas to Lexington, Ky., and missed Saturday’s preseason win over the Washington Wizards, sources confirmed, forcing the team to decide if they want to move forward with the talented guard, who has had his problems off the court.
Lawson also was late to Thursday morning’s shootaround prior to the Kings’ game against the Los Angeles Lakers in Las Vegas.
Kings general manager Vlade Divac did not return a message seeking comment. The official reason the team gave for Lawson’s absence Saturday was “personal reasons.”
If this entire situation is kind of hard to follow, everything was laid out chronologically in a tweet. This includes what happened after the flight, which included Broner getting arrested and Lawson posting a picture of himself back in Sacramento.
Ok, here's the entire bizarre situation as we know it so far. Let me know if I miss anything pic.twitter.com/20vrr2gdHc
— Professor OAK 🇵🇸 (@o_a_khan) October 17, 2016
As The Sacramento Bee pointed out, Lawson signed a non-guaranteed deal with the Kings, so if this ends up being a serious issue, he’ll probably get sent out of town. But the Kings, instead of making a knee-jerk decision, spoke to Lawson and he practiced with the squad on Monday. Lawson has reportedly looked good during training camp and the depth chart at point guard is a bit sparse due to Darren Collison’s eight-game suspension for pleading guilty to domestic battery, so it’s not a surprise that the team probably wanted to work this all out
Basically, it seems like this is all water under the bridge, even with Lawson’s less-than-desirable history of off-the-court situations.
