The Lakers season ends tonight at home with their 6th consecutive season of no playoffs.
Historically, this is an unprecedented stretch of ineptitude for the purple and gold, especially when factoring in LeBron’s arrival in LA. The Athletic’s Bill Oram did a deep dive into the Lakers front office in recent years and unearthed this nugget on Larry Nance being shipped out of town after being told he was safe to buy a home with his fiancée.
Nance Jr. and his fiancée, his college girlfriend, were interested in buying a house. He wanted to get a sense of whether the Lakers planned on keeping him around, and Pelinka told him that the Lakers would only trade him if it meant landing one of the game’s three best players. He told him to buy the house, multiple sources confirmed.
Before Nance could get that far, however, he received a call on the morning of Feb. 8, 2018. He and Jordan Clarkson had been traded to Cleveland in a salary dump that cleared cap space for the Lakers to be able to offer two max slots in the summer.
The NBA is a business and stories like these are abundant however it does no favors for Rob Pelinka who is despised by some in NBA circles. The piece also details Kyle Kuzma being been given assurances he is firmly in the Lakers future plans and is safe. We shall see how things play out, it’s hard to imagine a potential Anthony Davis trade without Kuzma invvolved.
