A Hollywood Ending, page 17
Davis didn’t care. He didn’t take any of Griffin’s calls; all communication from the Pelicans was funneled to Paul. Sensing that there was nothing else to be done, Griffin pivoted. His goal became maximizing the return in a Davis deal.
Pelinka reached out around the start of June, after hiring Vogel. He and Griffin began exchanging offers. Winning the lottery made things easier for Griffin. Even without Davis, the Pelicans would still have Williamson, a foundational piece they could build around. Surround him with some good, young talent, and add some future draft picks to the war chest, and the Pelicans could be one of the most well-positioned teams in the league. It helped that the Lakers had also jumped in the draft lottery—they now owned the No. 4 pick, giving them one more asset to dangle in a deal.
Griffin and Pelinka spent a few weeks going back and forth. Before long, they agreed to some basic parameters: In exchange for Davis, the Pelicans could get three of the Lakers’ four best young players—Ingram, Ball, Kuzma, and Hart—plus some draft assets.
“The Lakers didn’t really push back on anything or negotiate too much,” a then–Pelicans executive said. “They just wanted AD.”
Griffin knew that both LeBron and the Lakers could be shortsighted. He started pushing Pelinka for more. First, he insisted on not taking back any extra players; because he was short-selling their future, he didn’t want to help the Lakers clear cap space to go after a third star. He also told Pelinka that he wanted pick swaps, a simple tool used by NBA front offices to sidestep the “Stepien Rule,” which was implemented in the late ’80s to prevent teams from trading out of the first round in consecutive years. Named for former Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien, who had crippled the franchise by trading five straight first-round picks, it was supposed to protect teams from themselves.
When Griffin floated the idea of pick swaps, Pelinka said he’d consider it. A few days later, the two spoke again. Griffin then convened his front office in a conference room to provide an update. He told the group that the conversation had taken an odd turn. According to multiple Pelicans basketball operations staffers, Griffin said Pelinka had told him that Jeanie Buss didn’t know what pick swaps were. At first, Griffin assumed this was just a bargaining ploy; after all, it was common for GMs to blame their owners for holding up negotiations. But then, Griffin told his group, Pelinka posed a question: If their roles were reversed, how would Griffin go about explaining pick swaps to his boss?
Upon hearing this story, the Pelicans’ front office burst into laughter.[*16]
The Lakers, however, weren’t worried about minutiae, and they certainly weren’t going to let something as seemingly trivial as pick swaps get in the way of their latest star pursuit. Especially Jeanie, who remembered how her father had fawned over Davis during Davis’s Kentucky days. This was a franchise built on the backs of star pairings. Magic and Kareem. Kobe and Shaq. LeBron and AD would be next in line. “Ultimately, it was my decision to push the button,” Jeanie said years later. On June 15, just two days after the Raptors knocked off the Warriors in the finals, the Lakers and Pelicans agreed to terms. The Pelicans would get Ball, Ingram, Hart, and three first-round picks. They’d also get the right to swap picks in 2023.[*17]
“AD on da way!!” LeBron posted on Instagram that night. “Let’s get it bro! Just the beginning. #LakeShow.” The deal would become official on July 6, when the league’s free-agent moratorium ended.
With the Davis deal done, the Lakers were ready to move on to the next phase of their plan: using their remaining cap space to sign a third star, preferably Kawhi Leonard, an LA native who had just led the Raptors to a title and, after being named the finals MVP, was entering free agency.
Except the Lakers had made a mistake. Had Pelinka insisted that the deal be completed on July 30, he could have drafted the No. 4 pick for New Orleans. Then, once legally allowed to trade that drafted player thirty days later, Pelinka could have used his salary in the Davis deal. Through a series of complex salary cap rules, this would have allowed the Lakers to operate as an “over the cap” team and created $32.5 million in cap space, enough to sign a player to a max contract.[*18] By failing to do so, Pelinka and the Lakers had only $27.7 million in available cap room, a number that dropped to $23.7 million once Davis’s $4 million trade kicker—a bonus written into his contract by Klutch—was applied. They’d spent the year preparing to pursue Leonard, even instructing members of their training staff to outline a maintenance plan, and now they wouldn’t have the means to do so.
The error was immediately spotted by league insiders and reporters; ESPN highlighted it in its initial report on the trade. To get a third star Pelinka would now need to both find a way to turn the Lakers into an “over the cap” team and somehow convince Davis to waive his trade kicker.
Pelinka went to the Pelicans, but they refused to expand the deal. So he began working the phones. Finding a trade partner to offload some additional contracts was the easy part; doing so would just require the Lakers to surrender a pick or two. But the conversations with Paul and his negotiator, Mark Termini, over Davis’s kicker were more complicated. Termini wasn’t going to let Davis give up $4 million without getting something in return. Over the next couple of weeks, Termini and Paul spent hours on the phone with Jeanie, Pelinka, and Linda Rambis. Pelinka’s salary cap expert, Marshall Rader, and Kurt Rambis occasionally hopped on. The Lakers’ case was simple: They believed they had a strong shot at signing Leonard, but only if Davis played ball. If he didn’t, they pointed out, he’d be hurting LeBron’s championship prospects.
Neither Termini nor Paul believed Leonard was interested in joining the Lakers, but, on the off chance they were wrong, they were willing to help clear a path. So they proposed a deal. Davis would waive his trade kicker, but if the Lakers’ didn’t get Leonard, they’d re-sign Caldwell-Pope. Termini’s reasoning was simple. Caldwell-Pope was both a Klutch client and, given his skill set, the perfect player to slot alongside LeBron. The Lakers agreed to the deal and, after being briefed by Termini and Paul, Davis, who was thrilled to be heading to LA and joining a championship contender, was happy to go along. Pelinka then sent a 2022 second-round pick to the Wizards to persuade them to take on the contracts of reserves Moritz Wagner, Isaac Bonga, and Jemerrio Jones.
In early July, Leonard agreed to a contract with the Clippers, who, at his behest, had also traded for Paul George. The Lakers responded by agreeing to a two-year, $16.6 million deal with Caldwell-Pope (which included an $8.5 million player option for the 2020–21 season) and used their remaining cap space to add a bunch of veterans, like Rondo and McGee. They brought in Danny Green, a wing with two rings coming off a season in which he’d finished second in the league in three-point shooting percentage.
Pelinka might not have put together a Big Three, but, one year after the Lakers had whiffed on nearly every one of their roster decisions, he had surrounded LeBron with a team that made sense. The Lakers had role players who could both shoot and defend. They had veterans. They had a coach with playoff experience. And, in Davis, he had delivered LeBron his Robin. The journey to this point had been rocky. But neither the Lakers nor LeBron had ever been process-oriented. Both were about results, and, despite a year of mishaps, a title was now within grasp.
Skip Notes
*1 Eggers, who remains in contact with Pelinka today, declined to be interviewed for this book. Through a spokesperson, however, he described Pelinka’s high school story as “very accomplished.” What exactly does that mean? Eggers, through the spokesperson, declined to elaborate.
*2 Apparently this is the go-to move for Cavaliers owners after a player leaves in free agency.
*3 I reached out to Jim Paxson to get his side. He replied that he and Gund “both agreed never to talk about it”—the Boozer negotiations—“publicly again.”
*4 “We had many breakfast meetings,” Tellem told the Associated Press at the time, “but I told him”—Casey Wasserman—“he had me at the first bite of matzoh brei.” I’m aware that the majority of readers won’t have any idea what a matzoh brei is, but those who do will enjoy this.
*5 I feel the need to point out here that my experiences with Pelinka were similar. The Lakers did not cooperate with this book, and there were people within the organization (from high-level executives down to a member of the PR staff) who were not shy in hiding their disdain for both me and this project. Yet every time I saw Pelinka—on the court before a game, in the hallway after a game, walking around the gym at a scouting event—he was friendly and inquisitive.
*6 “What Michelangelo is to art, what Beethoven is to music, what Shakespeare is to words, you are to me as a friend, and you are to the Lakers, so thank you,” Pelinka said of Kobe.
*7 “That is not something that [Pelinka] said or would say,” the representative said. “He understood then and understands now that his job includes attending numerous meetings with his staff, Lakers management, players and agents, and others.”
*8 It’s worth pointing out that this food, known as manna, appears in the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but never in Genesis.
*9 Kobe would later say in an interview that Pelinka “got confused…I didn’t go out to dinner in New York. I stayed in my room…I stayed up watching Batman, and watching Heath Ledger. And then I went and started researching about Heath Ledger, and how he got into character and how he just became all-consuming.”
*10 This story was confirmed by multiple sources. When reached for comment, a Spurs spokesperson said, “R.C. has no knowledge of the anecdote.”
*11 “[That] we were supposedly trading our entire roster for a certain player…is completely not true,” Jeanie said on a panel at the 2019 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Technically, she was right. The Lakers had offered only half their roster to the Pelicans.
*12 The Lakers representative said Linda Rambis “had nothing to do with [Peterson] being hired” and that she had “no input into the decision” to do so. The representative added that “although Gunnar Peterson had been an acquaintance of Rambis’s years earlier, he was by no means a ‘family friend’ or anything close to it.” Given this response, I feel that it’s worth mentioning that Peterson has told at least one person that Kurt Rambis is the godfather to his oldest son.
*13 “Not covering expenses for personnel who have not been asked to attend or work at summer leagues and other events and who are nonessential but who have nevertheless chosen to attend for their own purposes is not ‘penny-pinching,’ ” the Lakers representative said.
*14 So, funny story: In this case, that someone “trying to create a false narrative” was me. This quote came from a 2023 interview Jeanie did with a reporter named Graham Bensinger. Bensinger was complimenting her for “not nickel-and-diming players” (Frost-Nixon, this was not), and Jeanie’s response was, “There’s somebody that’s out there writing a book, and he said to me that I have a reputation of running a bare-bones organization.” I had been told by Jeanie that our conversations were off the record, but since she referenced me in an on-the-record interview, I figured why not provide the full context here? Also, don’t blame the messenger; all I was doing was relaying the reputation and giving her a chance to respond.
*15 When he was asked about the shirt later that night, Davis said, “I actually didn’t choose it. It was hanging for me already when I put my clothes on…Every night, Big Shot”—apparently the nickname of one of Davis’s friends—“lays out what I’m gonna wear to the game. I have no control over that. I just put it on.” I don’t know about you, but I’m sure sold.
*16 The Lakers representative said, “To make it appear that [Jeanie] does not understand basketball and that she needs ‘mansplaining’ to inform her about pick swaps is false [and] outrageous.” The representative added that any “assertion that Pelinka did not understand pick swaps sufficiently to explain them to Jeanie Buss” is “outrageous” and “falsely portrays Pelinka as unknowledgeable about NBA contracts—something that no one has ever claimed about him and is utterly ludicrous to suggest about one of history’s most successful basketball agents.”
*17 The Pelicans would use those picks to draft or trade for the following players: Jaxson Hayes, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Didi Louzada, Herb Jones, and Dyson Daniels. Daniels turned into one of the best defensive players in the NBA. Jones became a premier role player. Louzada washed out of the NBA. Hayes became an end-of-the-bench afterthought. Alexander-Walker turned into a solid reserve.
*18 If these sentences hurt your brain, just know that you’re not alone.
- 8 -
A Lion’s Pride
Training camp hadn’t even begun, yet Laker players had gathered in Las Vegas to get a head start on the season. A few weeks earlier, in their group chat, LeBron had told his teammates that they’d all been brought together to win a championship. In order to achieve that goal, he wrote, he was organizing a run in late September, the week before the team’s official camp began.
The entire roster came to Vegas. The Lakers sent some assistant coaches, but it was LeBron’s show. He walked around the gym and corrected mistakes. “Don’t take it personal, just take it with you,” he’d say. He arranged and paid for team dinners. He posted GIFs in the group chat, like a pride of lions walking together through the jungle.
It was a far cry from his approach the previous season, when he seemed disinterested from the start. Part of it was that, with Davis, LeBron knew the Lakers had a championship-caliber roster. But missing the playoffs for the first time in fifteen years had also motivated him. He wasn’t going to let himself fall short again, and he wasn’t going to take days off. It was why, having committed to spending his summer filming the new Space Jam movie, he had a gym built on the Warner Bros. Studios lot. “He’d come onto the set in his workout gear half the time, and whenever he had a few minutes between scenes, he’d be doing some sort of work on the side, like getting a massage,” said Malcolm D. Lee, the director of Space Jam: A New Legacy. It was why, despite having the opportunity in the spring to disconnect from basketball in a way he hadn’t since entering the NBA, LeBron instead spent that time watching every minute of every playoff game, thinking about “what play would I have made in that moment if I was out there.”
The good vibes carried over from LeBron’s mini-camp into Lakers training camp. It helped that, unlike the previous summer, Pelinka had filled the roster with veterans, bringing back Rondo, Howard, and McGee while also adding, among others, Danny Green. These were players who’d been around for years. Some were former All-Stars. A few had won rings. None were intimidated by LeBron. They viewed him as a peer.
During training camp, the group came up with LeBron-specific rules, like allowing him to take one play off on defense every game. “But we told him that anything more than that and we’d get on him,” Jared Dudley, a veteran forward signed that summer, said. DeMarcus Cousins, a former All-Star coming off multiple injuries who had signed by the Lakers, would mock the stench of the durag LeBron wore every day to practice. Rondo would call out any favorable whistles LeBron received in scrimmages.
I know he’s been busting your ass every time down the floor, Rondo once shouted at a staffer after LeBron, having spent the entire run complaining about missed calls, received a phantom whistle on a potential game-winning layup. But you can’t just give the man the game.
Coming out of camp, everyone within the organization felt great about the team’s prospects. The Lakers were slated to begin their preseason in San Francisco on October 5, then head to China for a pair of exhibition games against the Nets. The country, with its millions of basketball-crazed fans, had become one of the NBA’s most lucrative markets, and almost every year since 2007, the league had sent a pair of teams on a barnstorming tour. It was a grueling trip, but one many players seemed to enjoy. China was a gold mine, a place where they could land seven-figure endorsement deals and boost shoe sales through local appearances. Few understood this better than LeBron, who’d visited the country at least once in each of the previous fifteen years, usually on trips organized by Nike.
The plan was to depart LAX on Monday, October 7; land in Shanghai on Tuesday; face the Nets the next day in Mercedes-Benz Arena; fly two hours south to Shenzhen; play the Nets again on Saturday; and then head home. A number of ancillary events, like press conferences, receptions with dignitaries, and appearances with the league’s social responsibility program, NBA Cares, would be sprinkled in between.
Those plans were derailed when, the week before, Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted an image that expressed support for pro-democracy protests unfolding in Hong Kong. The tweet, seen as being critical of the Chinese government, ignited a firestorm and jeopardized the league’s relationship with the country. Both CCTV, China’s national television broadcaster, and Tencent, one of its largest broadcasting companies, announced that they would cease showing games. Sponsors pulled their support for the Lakers-Nets exhibitions. Billboards and posters promoting the games were taken down. All media events and meet-and-greets were canceled. Morey’s tweet, which was later deleted, and the subsequent reaction, drew headlines in every corner of the media and became fodder for America’s publicity-hungry politicians. It also thrust the NBA into a position it had spent years trying to avoid. When it came to China’s poor human rights record, the league’s strategy had been simple: Stay quiet and steer clear. Thanks to Morey’s tweet, that would no longer work. The public had questions, and politicians were taking sides.
