The Nuggets and Knicks can't sign him unless the Lakers cut him or trade him which is not likely, but Caracter can sign with a non-NBA team. The Lakers would retain his rights in that case. He'd certainly get a ton more playing experience as a starter than he would as a rookie riding the pine in LA, but the trade-off is we would lose a valuable year of developing him under our system and the mutual benefit he and the Laker bigs would get by competing in practice.

This report has been "de-coded" as follows...

Now it doesn’t take Holmesian-level logic capacity to deduce the identities of at least two of the three unnamed (presumably) Euroleague teams in the running to bid for Caracter’s services: Clearly the "Israeli club" is Maccabi Tel Aviv – presuming Santa Claus hasn’t recently dumped an early Xmas gift of a few million on Galil/Gilboa – and one of those "two Italian teams" is certainly the American player-loving Virtus Roma. The logical assumption would be to pencil in Montepaschi Siena as the second Italia squad. (Source)

Much of the time-table seems to rest on payroll obligations: the signing of Brown, Ebanks, and Caracter pending the fate of Sasha.

European teams have been calling about Derrick Carcater and word is he was offered a multi-year, multi-million dollar offer from Maccabi Tel Aviv. So the Lakers are on the clock to get these deals done before they lose these players to other situations. All three, Brown, Carcater and Ebanks, would rather be Lakers, but if the business side continues to drag on who knows how it will play out. -From: Hoopsworld

In the long term, if Caracter develops, he would be a much cheaper option than Odom. Odom will be here for the three-peat, but Caracter could make a case for himself after that considering the luxury-tax adjusted cost differential would be over $14 million. The sooner Caracter develops in our system, the sooner he could start saving Dr. Buss some cash, so I'm sure the FO is motivated to keep him in LA this year.

Caracter has stated he wants to prove he should have been a first round prospect, so that also bodes well for him playing for the Lakers. The international teams can offer him much more money, though, and that has to be tempting for a rookie.