Rob Pelinka Discussion: President Of BBall Ops + GM + Extension

I'm also wondering why you would become a GM?

I believe agents make way more money especially with the clients that he has.

 

Plus by all accounts, the Lakers are the team he really knows and has the deepest relationship with

 

That's a pay cut for an agent. If he took just 3% of Kobe's 48 million dollar deal, he got 1.4 million (he could have gotten much more). If he got 3% of Harden's giant 117 million dollar contract, he got over 3 million there and like I said he probably got much more than that. Those are just two of his clients and I already got close to your 4-5 million dollar estimate. He's got many more clients than that and he probably took a better percentage of their deals.

 

Yeah the more I think about this, the better I feel.

One of the biggest criticisms that I'm seeing from the general media, specifically Woj (who seems to really not like the Lakers), is that Magic is a novice who doesn't know what he's doing. The media has been very, very quick to point out that if we're relying on Magic to get deals done just because he's charismatic and he's Magic and he's a legend and all that, then we've missed the point and we're going to continue to fail in FA.

What most of them don't want to admit is that Pelinka is going to negate a lot of those issues. Magic is not here to be the pitch man, he's the closer. The pitch man is Pelinka who has ties all across the league both to players and front offices. He's got players on teams across the country from high paid stars to low men on the totem pole. He's got a great knowledge of the new CBA and will be able to navigate it easier than Mitch did. Pelinka is the one who will be explaining to agents what sort of team we can and will build around them and that's a huge positive. I'm not saying he's going to be a great GM off the bat, that's unlikely, but I am saying he'll be better at a lot of the things Mitch struggled with.

Magic is just here to put the cherry on top. Magic is here to be a likable personality capable of swaying someone on the fence. He'll emphasize our culture, our desire to win above all else, how we treat our players with the utmost respect and adulation, and that we're going to leave no stone unturned in trying to reach the peak. These may all be buzz words and smoke and mirrors, but they are important when dealing with a potential client. After Pelinka convinces the FA that the Lakers CAN do something, it's up to Magic to prove that we WILL and I think Magic will excel in that area just like Dr. Buss did before him.

 

Except that to hire those people would require extraordinary effort. She said many people were interested, including a lot of other teams' GMs, but to get them we'd have to sacrifice something like the Clippers did to get Rivers. This way we didn't have to sacrifice anything and Pelinka is an interesting candidate anyway.

edit: here's the link http://www.espn.com/espnradio/losangeles/play

She goes over it at 8:50 or so.

 

I'm not sure why Pelinka would do this. It is likely a massive paycut. I'm also not ready to jump on board that he's the next great GM. The dude has never even been an assistant GM. A lot of smart, well connected dudes fail in whatever industry they are in. So much of it is luck. Look at Mitch and Jim. If the ping pong balls dropped slightly different and we got Towns instead of Russell, are they fired right now?

 

Yesterday she was saying we didn't want to wait though, that's why we moved quick. She was saying we didn't want to get permission to speak to other teams GMs and give them compensation if we hired them. She did say a lot of people came out and wanted this job, some you wouldn't expect, but if we didn't want to sit around and wait, I don't see why people would be mad at us.