A Hollywood Ending, page 23
“I love what we did tonight,” LeBron told reporters after the game. He was confident and came out in Game 5 like a man intent on ending the series. He repeatedly rumbled to the rim and sank long-range bombs and midway through the fourth quarter led the Lakers on a 14–3 run, giving them a three-point lead with just 5:28 remaining. The NBA had confetti cannons on the sidelines, loaded and ready to launch. But Butler had come out with a plan of his own, which was to be everywhere and do everything. He racked up 35 points and 13 assists and 11 rebounds and five steals and played all but 48 seconds of the game, enough to overcome LeBron’s 40 points and give the Heat a 111–108 win to keep their season alive.
“Jimmy Effin’ Butler” was how Spoelstra summarized the performance after the game. The night’s most memorable moment had come when ESPN’s cameras captured Butler, following a foul-drawing drive to the rim in the game’s final minute, slumped over a video board and gasping for air.
The Lakers felt like they had let one slip away. Not only had they allowed Butler to impose his will, but Green had also misfired on a wide-open three on the final possession, one that would have sent the game to overtime. Later that night, Green and his fiancée received death threats from Lakers fans on social media. To top it off, Davis had aggravated his foot injury.
The next day, the Lakers filed into the hotel conference room for their morning film session. Vogel’s film reviews were always exhaustive and intense, but they knew this would be different. Kidd, who usually led the discussion about offense, took the first half hour. Then it was Vogel’s turn. Earlier that morning, Kidd had suggested replacing Howard in the starting lineup with Alex Caruso, and, after mulling it over, Vogel informed the team that he was making the change. He wanted more athleticism on the court and to smother the Heat’s shooters. Starting Caruso, the team’s top perimeter defender, made sense.
Vogel went over the new plan for guarding Butler. The Lakers would be more aggressive in their pick-and-roll defense and Davis would cease switching onto the screener when picks were set for Butler. The goal was to stop letting Butler dictate matchups. Meanwhile, Caldwell-Pope would remain glued to Duncan Robinson, who had knocked down seven threes the previous game, and Caruso would wreak havoc all over the floor.
Do all that, Vogel said, and the Lakers would be in good shape.
But LeBron didn’t want to leave his championship chances in anyone else’s hands. He knew that no one was more equipped to handle Butler than him, and that if the Lakers could just contain Butler for one more game, he’d be leaving the bubble with his fourth ring.
Coach, all due respect, he shouted out about midway through Vogel’s presentation, fuck that, I got him.
Rondo also had a thought.
We’re picking him up full-court, he said. I’m tired of this man feeling comfortable. He’s the only one that can make plays. So we’re going to wear him all the way down.
Vogel signed off on both ideas. The Lakers spent the rest of their film session and that day’s practice implementing the scheme.
“It was the most intense film session and practice I ever had,” Dudley said years later.
The Lakers came out the next night eager and engaged. The game plan was followed to a tee. LeBron stuck to Butler, even when the Heat set screens, and pushed the pace whenever he had the ball. Green hounded Butler in the backcourt. Caldwell-Pope didn’t leave Robinson’s side. Caruso flew around the court. The defense was suffocating, and, in the second quarter, thanks to another electric stretch from Rondo and Caldwell-Pope finding his outside stroke, they were able to blow the game open.
The Lakers entered the locker room at halftime leading 64–36. The lead ballooned to 82–46 late in the third quarter. The Heat kept fighting and outscored the Lakers by 16 points in the fourth quarter, but by then the celebration was already on.
With less than one minute on the clock, ESPN caught LeBron wrapping his arms around Davis’s neck, like a big brother embracing a younger sibling. An expression of pure joy had spread across LeBron’s face. For the first time since arriving in the bubble, he looked happy. After the final buzzer, he and his teammates leapt into each other’s arms. J. R. Smith shed his shirt. Davis sat by himself off to the side, face buried in a towel. Confetti rained down as the league pumped in artificial cheers. LeBron went teammate to teammate, offering hugs and daps.
The Louis Vuitton travel case carrying the Larry O’Brien Trophy was wheeled onto the floor. As Adam Silver took the mic to congratulate the team, LeBron found Jeanie, who’d only recently arrived in the bubble and who hadn’t been allowed to mix with her team until now, and wrapped his arms around her.
“We accomplished what we set out to do,” he told her.
Soaking in the moment, Jeanie closed her eyes and smiled. She nodded.
“Thank you,” she said.
After Silver was done, Jeanie stepped to the mic. She thanked Pelinka. She thanked Vogel. She thanked the coaching staff. She thanked the training staff. She thanked the employees back in Los Angeles. She told the players she was proud of them “on and off the court.”
“You have written your own inspiring chapter in the great Laker history,” she said.
She took a moment to recognize Kobe and Gianna Bryant.
“Let this trophy serve as a reminder of when we come together, believe in each other, incredible things can happen,” she said.
She told Lakers fans that she looked forward to celebrating with them “when it’s safe.”
Silver announced, to the surprise of no one, that LeBron had won Finals MVP.[*5] It was his fourth time winning the award, moving him past Magic, Tim Duncan, and Shaq for second all-time.
“I told Jeanie when I came here that I was going to put this franchise back in a position where it belongs,” he said after accepting the award. “Her late, great father did it for so many years and she just took it on after that and for me to be part of such a historical franchise is an unbelievable feeling.”
He paused and rubbed his brow. Standing there after the three months he’d just endured, confetti raining down, had stirred something within him. For just one moment, the joy turned to indignation.
“We just want our respect,” he continued. “Rob wants his respect”—Pelinka could be seen in the background of the live shot, nodding—“Coach Vogel wants his respect, our organization wants their respect, Laker Nation want their respect.”
LeBron knew all the history, he’d heard all the noise. That Jeanie had to save the team from her brothers, that Pelinka was in over his head and there only because he was close with Kobe, that Tyronn Lue should have been coaching the team and not Vogel, that the organization was a clown show, nothing like the one made famous by Dr. Buss.
Some of the criticism, LeBron recognized, was valid. Or at least maybe it was before this title run. Now, though? Not only had Pelinka pulled off the Davis deal, but he’d also nailed his other signings, giving the Lakers a roster with the skills and versatility to roll through the playoffs. And not only had Vogel jelled with his veterans—so much so that he received no pushback during the playoffs after yanking some from the rotation—but he’d also transformed the Lakers into an elite defense and spent the playoffs proving to be as good on the fly as any of his peers. And not only had LeBron averaged nearly a triple-double in the finals (30 points, 12 rebounds, and nine assists per game while shooting 59 percent), but he’d done so in unprecedented circumstances. At the same time, he’d followed in the footsteps of some of his idols, not just using his voice to call for social and political change but also using his resources to effect change on the ground; earlier that month, More Than a Vote had announced that it had signed up ten thousand volunteer poll workers. Standing there, in a mostly empty gym but with millions of people watching on TV, he paused one more time. And then:
“I want my damn respect, too.”
Some players laughed. Others cheered.
“King James!” Pelinka shouted while clapping. “King James!”
Jeanie nodded.
Two years earlier, she and LeBron had come together because each had something the other needed.
Two years into their partnership, they’d both gotten what they wanted.
What neither knew, standing there amid all the confetti, was that this partnership had just reached its peak.
Skip Notes
*1 The players weren’t the only ones who picked up hobbies. The referees played pickleball, and a bunch of coaches used a path on the campus for regular jogs and walks. Clothing, apparently, was optional. “[Milwaukee Bucks head coach] Mike Budenholzer would always do laps around [a path], and he would always not wear his shirt, and he’s just walking around,” ESPN’s Wojnarowski once recalled.
*2 Or, as Jared Dudley put it, “No distraction, no females, people weren’t going to clubs, no drinking.”
*3 It’s worth noting that VanVleet’s stepfather, who helped raise him, was a police officer in Rockford, Illinois.
*4 They also ended all huddles during the bubble with a chant of “One, two, three, Mamba!”
*5 Davis finished the finals averaging 25 points, 10.7 rebounds, and 3.2 assists per game while shooting 57.1 percent from the field.
- 10 -
Seventy-One Days
Trophy ceremony complete, the Lakers moved the celebration to the locker room, where they were greeted by bottles of champagne. “Goggles! I need some goggles!” LeBron shouted. “You’re not about to spray me and burn my fucking eyes.” A four-time champion, he knew the dangers that awaited. He also knew that, this time around, the party would be different. He and his teammates weren’t simply celebrating a title. They were also celebrating that, after spending ninety-six days in the bubble, they were finally heading home.
“I’m free out of this bitch,” Danny Green shouted as he sprinted down the hallway. “I’m fucking free!”
The music inside the locker room was turned all the way up. J. R. Smith took out his phone and began broadcasting on Instagram Live. LeBron doused a group of reporters outside the locker room and then headed down a hallway. After finding a spot he liked, he splayed himself out on the carpeted floor and, in full view of the media, hit the call button on FaceTime.
“Mama, Mama!” he shouted between puffs of a cigar.
“I love you. I love you, you are the reason why I’m able to even do this, Mom,” he told Gloria James. “You don’t understand—sixteen years old, you bring a little-ass, big-headed-ass boy into the world? C’mon. C’mon, Mom.”
“God is good,” Gloria said.
“God is good. God is great,” LeBron said. “I hope I continue to make you proud, Mom.”
LeBron and his teammates spent the next hour-plus making the media rounds. A little after midnight, they staggered onto the team bus and headed back to the hotel. Smith continued streaming on Instagram.
“QC!” he shouted, after noticing that one of his teammates, Quinn Cook, was writing in the comments.
“Gotta walk back after I win a fucking ring,” Cook wrote. “Wtf.”
“Yo, we left QC, bro,” Smith, clearly a few glasses in, said out loud.
“Come backkkk,” Cook added.
Back at the hotel, Pelinka filled out the sixteenth and final “X” on the board in the hallway. Davis told teammates to start referring to him as “Champ.” Everyone met up at Three Bridges Bar & Grill. Family and friends joined, many of whom Lakers players and staff hadn’t seen in months. On his way to the celebration, Pelinka spotted his ten-year-old daughter. “She came running down [the dock] like a scene out of a movie, and it felt like it was slow-motion to me,” he recalled. “When she grabbed my neck, I felt like she wasn’t gonna let go. She had tears in her eyes.”
The players passed around bottles of Ace of Spades and 1942 Dom Pérignon as the music blared. Assistant coach Mike Penberthy handed out cigars. The party went past 4 a.m. “If we were in LA at the time and not in the bubble, it would have been a hundred times better,” Markieff Morris said. “Ain’t too much you can do in the damn bubble, but we enjoyed each other, did the best we could.”
Later that morning, the Lakers boarded a plane headed back to LA. “You ever see the movie Shawshank Redemption?” Dudley asked an interviewer later that month. “I’ve never been to prison. I’m not saying it was like prison, but it felt like you were isolated from the world, and so to get out, man, and to be a champion and have a trophy, no better feeling I’ve ever had.”
* * *
• • •
The title celebrations were barely complete and Pelinka was already concerned.
The pandemic and subsequent suspension of games had thrown the league’s calendar in flux, and now that the bubble was done, the NBA was looking to get things back on track. It needed to, for financial reasons. Covid had already cost the league hundreds of millions of dollars. In order to prevent a further loss of between $500 million and $1 billion in revenue, the NBA was looking to start the season before Christmas. Doing so would ensure that Disney had games to air on Christmas Day—one of the most valuable TV days of the year—and prevent the finals from overlapping with the Olympics in July, which would hurt ratings.
By the first week of November, the NBA and the NBPA had settled on a start date of December 22. That meant that the Lakers’ offseason would last just seventy-one days, the shortest for any team in league history. As if that wasn’t enough, the league would now be squeezing a 72-game season into five months, as opposed to the typical six it used to play 82. This would be a difficult task for any veteran roster, but especially so for one like the Lakers, not even three months removed from a grueling playoff slog.
Pelinka didn’t think his championship roster, as constructed, could make it through such a season. He believed his group needed younger bodies and more playmakers. The former would boost the Lakers’ odds of staying healthy, the latter would ease LeBron’s regular-season load and help ensure that, come playoff time, he still had his legs.
Pelinka spent the weeks after the finals canvassing the league for options. “It’s easy to fall into complacency when you win a title and just say, ‘Hey, let’s just run it back,’ ” he later told reporters. “But my school of thought is always, ‘Let’s find a way we can become even better. Every offseason, let’s get better.’ We never want to just settle.” In mid-November, a few days before the draft, he made his first move, acquiring Dennis Schröder from the Thunder for Green and a first-round pick. Schröder, a twenty-seven-year-old point guard, was exactly the sort of player Pelinka was looking for, a talented, off-the-dribble shot creator with a decent shooting stroke who, the Lakers thought, could both run the offense when LeBron sat and also play alongside him.
After the draft, Pelinka continued tinkering. He pried twenty-six-year-old power forward Montrezl Harrell, a skilled young scorer and the reigning Sixth Man of the Year, away from the Clippers with a two-year, $20 million deal. He also signed former Defensive Player of the Year and three-time All-Star Marc Gasol, who had played a key role in the Raptors’ 2019 title run, and brought back Caldwell-Pope on a three-year, $40 million deal. The moves were widely praised.
“This team should be considered favorites to repeat,” ESPN’s Zach Lowe, a prominent and widely respected NBA analyst, wrote in an offseason column. He listed the Lakers as one of his free-agency “winners.”
The praise for Pelinka’s offseason wasn’t just coming from outside the building, either. “We absolutely can [repeat],” LeBron said in a podcast interview in early December. He lauded Gasol’s defensive skills and “IQ.” He complimented Schröder’s disposition on the court. “He’s Dennis the Menace,” LeBron said. “What he brings to the game, the tenacity, he’s a dog.” He described Harrell as someone “who’s gonna help our bench, which we struggled with this past year.” LeBron was so thrilled that he felt comfortable agreeing to a two-year, $85 million extension before training camp, yet another break from his previous one-plus-one deals and the sort of multi-year commitment he never gave the Cavaliers during his second stint. The contract meant that, barring a trade, he’d be in a Lakers uniform through the end of the 2022–23 season. One day later it was reported that Davis had also agreed to a new contract with the Lakers, this one a five-year, $190 million deal, the maximum amount allowed.
In the span of two days, Pelinka had locked up two of the league’s top players. Forget defending champions. The Lakers now looked like a budding dynasty.
* * *
• • •
After free agency, agents and executives around the league began playing a game with media members. Go look at the Lakers’ roster, they’d say. Count up how many Klutch guys they have.
LeBron, Davis, and Caldwell-Pope had been there for a few years. And Talen Horton-Tucker, whom the Lakers drafted 46th overall in 2019, was a Klutch client, too. But Harrell was also with Rich Paul, meaning Klutch now had five players on the roster, four of whom were slated to get major minutes. “The whole league would joke about it,” Horton-Tucker said. “Things like calling us the ‘Klutch Mafia,’ and stuff like that.” Paul wasn’t the first agent to have multiple players on one roster. What made this different, though, is that the relationship between the two entities had morphed into something closer to a partnership.
“It’s an agency town, and the Lakers became an agency team,” a rival NBA executive said.
The evolution had started in July 2019, after Paul sold a chunk of his business to the Hollywood powerhouse United Talent Agency. That a shop like UTA was interested in Klutch was a testament to his success and a sign of just how far Paul had come. But joining UTA changed Klutch’s business. Paul was now part of a new, different, and larger world. He was still hustling—colleagues often laughed at how few hours had passed between his first call to them in the morning and his final call to them the night before—but his priorities were different. He’d proven his critics wrong, and that meant he no longer had to fight the same sort of battles. His days of taking contract negotiations or team decisions personally were over. “It’s a business, and I always tell my guys it’s a business,” he’d say. As the years had gone by, he’d also begun embracing his role as a mentor, someone who, by showing his clients all the things he’d learned through the years, could pave the way for others from similar backgrounds, whether they were athletes or just kids from Black neighborhoods trying to break into the business. He’d preach to clients the importance of diversifying portfolios and connect them to different departments within UTA. He shared his email address with young professionals looking for guidance. He even took on the NCAA in 2019 after it instituted a rule requiring agents to have a bachelor’s degree in order to work with prospects. The change was viewed by many as a shot at Paul (and was casually referred to by many as the “Rich Paul Rule”) and a method for barring others like him from breaking into the business.
