2. The Los Angeles Lakers are hard-pressed to improve and don’t want to lose that extra cap space
The Los Angeles Lakers are in a situation where they can pay money to sign Dennis Schroder but will not be able to simply spend that same money on someone else. The option for the Lakers is to pretty much spend it on Schroder or don’t spend it at all. We see this all the time in the NBA with how the salary cap works.
The Lakers acquired the Bird Rights to Schroder via trade and can go over the salary cap to re-sign him so long that they do not go over the hard cap. This essentially gives the team around $20-25 million to spend on Schroder that they cannot spend elsewhere.
That is the point of the sign-and-trade. The Lakers can spend that money on Schroder and then flip that asset for another asset, essentially signing another player with the money that they have to pay Schroder.
This is the perfect case of a team not wanting to outright lose the asset while also improving upon the asset. If there is no team biting on a sign-and-trade then the Lakers should probably just outright sign Schroder anyway with the plans of eventually upgrading, but getting that upgrade now is huge.
The Lakers are in championship mode and while they might not get a massive talent upgrade, the team could still upgrade by getting a much better fit than Schroder.