Western Notes: Young, Clippers, Lin, Waiters

Nick Young wants to help the Lakers recruit marquee free agents this summer, but he was worried that there wouldn’t have been room for the club to re-sign him this past offseason if the Lakers had landed a star then, as he tells Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News. 

“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Young said. “I was nervous and scared. I wanted to be here, but I kept hearing all the Carmelo [Anthony] rumors and Kobe [Bryant] having dinner with Carmelo. I knew once they paid him all that money, there would be none for me.”

Young, who inked a four-year, $21.326MM deal with the Lakers in July, told Medina that the Pelicans, Mavs and Bulls also had interest in him, and agent Mark Bartelstein told Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com this summer that there had been contact with the Hawks. There’s more from L.A. amid the latest from the Western Conference:

• Clippers coach/executive Doc Rivers expects to use his pair of open roster spots on veterans next month, writes Arash Markazi of ESPN.com, suggesting that the team will again target the post-buyout market as it did last year.
• Dion Waiters, who’s up for a rookie scale extension this summer, says he “couldn’t ask for a better situation” than the one he finds himself in since the trade that sent him to the Thunder, as he tells The Oklahoman’s Darnell Mayberry. “They brought me in since Day One with love,” Waiters said of his new teammates. “It seems like I’ve been here forever. It seems like I’ve been playing with them forever, too. When I came here, we clicked right away.”
• Jeremy Lin has his moments for the Lakers, but he continues to struggle to live up to the backloaded three-year, $25.124MM deal he signed with the Rockets in 2012, much less his dazzling “Lin-sanity” run with the Knicks, as Bill Oram of the Orange County Register examines. Lin is set for free agency this summer.