WHEN KNECHT MEANS CONNECT AND SILENCES LEBRON ONLINE, THE LAKERS HAVE HOPE

James and Davis finally share a sweet gunner who made nine three-pointers and scored 37 points — and shrugged like Jordan — which makes us ask why other teams allowed him to go 17th in the NBA draft

     How is it possible that Dalton Knecht, with a name pronounced Connect, slid until the 17th pick of the first round? When Snoop Dogg calls him “Westside Knecht,” isn’t it a Los Angeles reference to a gangsta rap supergroup for a guy who was born in Fargo and grew up in unincorporated Colorado? Do we just laugh when he nails a flurry of three-pointers and shrugs at midcourt like Michael Jordan?

     “I’m signed to Jordan Brand,” he said. “Had to.”

     Better still, the finest fundamental advancement of his NBA shooting prowess involves running LeBron James off social media. Doesn’t that development make us very happy? Seems James watched Knecht excel last season as the SEC’s Player of the Year and mentioned it often. Nonetheless, he is scolded online by those who thinks he’s lying.

     “I don’t know. The same s— I said last year. And everybody on the Internet calls me a liar all the time,” James said. “They say I lie about every f—ing thing. So what am I now? I’ve said it. I watched him. I watched Tennessee a lot.”

     So? “And with that said, I'll holla at y'all! Getting off social media for the time being. Y'all take care,” posted James, with a two-finger emoji saying goodbye.

     Not that he doesn’t have happier things to do this season. Finally armed with a gunner who might take them to a contender’s level, the Lakers have won six straight games with a 10-4 record under new coach JJ Redick. Knecht scored 37 points with nine threes on Tuesday night, part of a recent swirl of long-range bedlam that has us all wondering what other teams were doing on draft night. “They didn’t find DK. The other 16 teams f—ed it up,” James said of his team’s front office. “Did anyone watch him?”

     Oddly, scouts thought of him only as a college mainstay and preferred names obscure to us — Matas Buzelis in Chicago? — when Knecht already is deadly with the shot. Didn’t he score 37 points in an NCAA tournament loss to Purdue? Have we lost regard for that level when so many no-names are taken early in the draft? Or when LeBron’s son, Bronny, left USC after his freshman year and is playing G League ball with the South Bay Lakers? Every so often, a dude taken 17th becomes one of the league’s wilder stories. Redick is living a new vicarious life as a former sharpshooter. He creates plays for Knecht on a team led by James and MVP candidate Anthony Davis.

     “I think every time I shoot the ball, I think it’s a great shot. Every time I see one go in, I think the next one is going in,” said Knecht, not joking. “It's always good to have a coach like that, that's super confident in you, always wanting you to shoot the ball. So when I go out there and I do shoot some crazy shots or something that I shouldn’t be shooting, it's always good that JJ will have my back.”

     “I’m not concerned at all with Dalton in terms of meeting the moment. He’s fearless,” Redick said. “It’s a real weapon for our group beyond just the score. It’s a weapon that energizes us. He provides something we just don’t have. He’s a movement shooter, he can obviously play off the bounce. He can score at all three levels. He’s got size, and there was a lot of things to be excited about with Dalton. And I’m excited to coach him.”

     No longer do the Lakers depend entirely on James and Davis to carry them and, at their age, risk messy injuries. Has Knecht become the outpouring of hope in the Western Conference, where Oklahoma City is the favorite and Golden State is scoring 120 points a game? “We just urge him to shoot the basketball,” Davis said. “He can do more than just shoot, but he’s really good at shooting the ball. We get mad at him when he don’t shoot.”

     “If you watched him in college, you know what he’s capable of. And when he sees a couple of his first shots go in, he can get in that mode where he’s unconscious,” said teammate Austin Reaves, who texted Knecht at Tennessee. “I kind of expect it from him because I’ve watched him a lot.”

     He was ignored out of high school, where he was 5 foot 4 as a freshman and attended Northeastern Junior College and Northern Colorado. “Been underrated my whole entire life, from junior college to my old school and stuff like that,” Knecht said. “I feel like I've been underrated my whole life, so I always have a chip on my shoulder.”

     With Snoop in the stands at Crypto.com Arena and LeBron putting down his device, those days are over. The NBA Cup is upon the Lakers, a prize they won last season, and each triumphant player receives $500,000.

     “Need that,” Knecht said.

     Until then, he’ll listen to mates who ask him to celebrate his threes with the crowd. “I didn’t know what to do. So I just gave it ‘The Shrug,’ ’’ he said.

     Jordan signed him to a deal. He knew, too. Why didn’t anyone else?

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.