When it comes to the NBA, superteams and Big Threes have become far more common in the last dozen years and more. Starting with the Celtics in 2008 and carrying even to the Lakers attempt at a Big Three in the last two seasons with LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Russell Westbrook, teams across the league have attempted to bring together superstars in hopes of winning a title.
An off-the-court superteam that would rival any on-court product may have nearly come to fruition in recent years.
On his appearance on JJ Redick’s Old Man & the Three podcast, Klutch Sports founder Rich Paul revealed that he and Rob Pelinka discussed working together before the latter took the job in the Lakers front office.
“You know what? People don’t know this. Rob Pelinka and I had a real conversation about working together before he took the Lakers job.”
The term “working together” is vague enough that it could mean any number of things. Pelinka was a pretty powerful agent in terms of clients represented even in the final days leading up to him being hired by the Lakers. The likes of James Harden, Buddy Hield, Andre Iguodala (who recently spoke about Pelinka’s role in his career), Eric Gordon, Andre Drummond and so many others had Pelinka as their agent as well as, obviously, Kobe Bryant.
If it was as simple as Pelinka joining Klutch Sports, it would have been a pretty seismic shift in the agent landscape. Two of the more powerful agents in the NBA coming together would have been very, very notable.
This also might explain the quite smooth relationship between Paul and Pelinka during LeBron James’ time in Los Angeles. Any sort of issue that could have turned into something much bigger has always been squashed from the start and never developed into anything more.
Ultimately, we’ll never know what would have happened if the two worked together in an official capacity. However, getting a sense of how they’ve handled things with the Lakers together and how powerful they were as agents independent of one another, it feels pretty safe to say it would have been a pretty successful partnership.
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