Lakers Waive Kendall Marshall

2:30pm: The move is official, the team announced.

12:51pm: The Lakers have decided to waive the non-guaranteed contract of Kendall Marshall, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). The team nonetheless has interest in re-signing him should he clear waivers, Wojnarowski adds. The move appears tied to the team’s deal with Xavier Henry, as dropping Marshall allows the Lakers to open $915,243 more in cap room after they used much of their available space on their winning amnesty bid for Carlos Boozer.

The move appears to signal that the team is prepared to make Jeremy Lin the starting point guard. Marshall would have provided stiff competition for Lin, having come off a strong performance for the Lakers, who signed him in December. The 22-year-old averaged 8.0 points and an impressive 8.8 assists in 29.0 minutes per game across 54 appearances, helping revive a career that had gone south seemingly ever since the Suns made him the 13th overall pick in the 2012 draft.

The addition of Boozer at $3.251MM against the cap for next season meant the Lakers didn’t have enough cap space to fulfill their agreement with Nick Young on a four-year, $21.5MM deal, as Eric Pincus of the Los Angeles Times noted late Thursday (Twitter link). That means the team would either have to renounce its rights to Ryan Kelly, whom the Lakers are interested in re-signing, or waive Marshall. I wouldn’t be surprised if another team picked his minimum-salary contract off waivers, given his cheap cost, youth, and production last season.

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