Despite it being pretty clear for a while that the Anthony Davis trade talks and ensuing Lakers rumors about which players might be getting shipped out for him — all of them — had a negative effect on the locker room, and that Magic Johnson saying that no one should treat the Lakers’ players “like babies” certainly didn’t seem to help, those assumptions were mostly based off of results, and the eye test of how bad the Lakers looked on the court afterwards.
In other words, we had never really gotten sourced and reported confirmation that those assumptions were true.