"What have you done for me lately?"
That's the mantra in the NBA, and truly in all sports. When an individual or a team does something successful, it dims the lights on past failures. Similarly, when they fall flat on their face, it rings louder than a track record of success.
That is exactly what happened to Los Angeles Lakers executive Rob Pelinka. Serving as both the Vice President of Basketball Operations and the General Manager, Pelinka is in charge of every basketball decision the Lakers make, from filling two-way slots to trading for perennial MVP candidates.
The Dallas Mavericks shocked the NBA world when they traded superstar guard Luka Doncic to the Lakers on Saturday night. Top-5 players do not get traded in a star-driven NBA, but especially not out of nowhere and without their consent. It was a truly shocking moment in history.
Even more shocking was that the Mavericks traded away such a star without getting an earth-shattering return. Anthony Davis was the centerpiece of the trade package coming back to the Mavericks, along with young wing Max Christie and a single first-round pick in 2029.
The Lakers didn't trade rookie Dalton Knecht. They didn't trade their 2031 first. They kept their first-round swaps and their second-round pick. This deal was not cheap, per se, but Rob Pelinka landed a 25-year-old first-team All-NBA player and didn't give up the farm to do it.
Suddenly Pelinka was being praised as a hero, the negotiation wizard who leveraged trust build by being Kobe Bryant's agent (a relationship he already leveraged into his current job) to fleece another former agent into giving up his superstar player. The Lakers had done it again, adding yet another MVP type player drafted by someone else, and it was all pulled off by Rob Pelinka.
Now, it should absolutely be acknowledged that Pelinka won the Luka Doncic trade. He leveraged the need for secrecy into a better trade return for his team. But one move does not a shrewd negotiator make.
The bubble of "Rob Pelinka GM extraordinaire" was popped just 96 hours later.
Rob Pelinka missed the mark with Mark Williams trade
Wednesday night Pelinka made his second significant Trade Deadline move, taking all of the assets he saved in the Luka Doncic trade and sending them to the Charlotte Hornets for center Mark Williams. Rookie Dalton Knecht, Cam Reddish, a 2030 first-round swap and a 2031 first-round pick are heading to the Hornets.
The reasoning behind making the move is obvious. After trading Anthony Davis the Lakers have a massive hole at center, and Luka Doncic has thrived playing alongside a rim-running, lob-catching center. Mark Williams can absolutely fill that role on offense as a hyper-efficient finisher. This season he has expanded his offensive impact and is averaging 15.6 points and 2.5 assists per game.
That expanded game has only been displayed in 23 games, however, as Williams missed significant time earlier in the season with a foot injury. Last season he was limited to only 19 appearances because of a back injury. As a rookie, he hit the high-water mark of 43 games.
Add on to the injury concerns that Williams has not developed defensively as many expected he would coming out of Duke, where he was a defensive monster in the paint in the college system. In the faster, more spread out NBA he is more of a traffic cone on defense, a big player in the way but not someone opposing players fear.
The Hornets are not a good defensive team to begin with, but they are even worse when Williams takes the court. They allow 5.3 more points per 100 possessions when he plays than when he doesn't, in the 13th percentile leaguewide per Cleaning the Glass. When Mark Williams is the closest defender within six feet of the rim, opposing players shoot a whopping 67.6 percent, 2.4 percent better than average.
Pelinka heard his new superstar player say he wanted a center, looked at the roster and knew they needed a center, but ignored all of the yellow flags about Mark Williams and traded the farm for him. Could such a strong package not have brought back a better, more established center, one who combined vertical gravity with good defense? Williams is a poor defensive palyer who misses more games than he plays due to injury. That's the player you empty the quiver for?
Rob Pelinka has a track record of bad trades
Rob Pelinka is no stranger to being influenced by a star player into making a bad trade. The coup de grace is the Russell Westbrook deal, where LeBron James communicated that he wanted to play with Westbrook and the Lakers proceeded to trade useful young players and a first-round pick for a player in Westbrook who had not embraced being a role player yet. He came in and sabotaged the Lakers, taking a title team and reducing it to a Play-In Team. It was one of the single worst trades of the last 20 years.
It was hardly alone in the annals of poor trades, however. Pelinka was just barely on the job when he made the original Anthony Davis trade, where he bid against himself and traded everything that was not nailed down for Davis. That included a cadre of young rising stars, draft picks galore and perhaps the deed to his house. The New Orleans Pelicans fleeced Pelinka.
The Lakers jettisoned Danny Green and the pick that became Jaden McDaniels for a year of Dennis Schroder. They traded for Rui Hachimura and Jarred Vanderbilt and then signed them to painful long-term contracts that look like albatrosses now. So on and so forth.
Pelinka has gotten a few things right, to be sure, but his track record screams that he is easily influenced, does not value assets properly and has nearly zero clue how to build a roster that works well together. He did oversee a championship team, but that was born out of forces outside of him and he managed to crumble it to pieces just months later.
Rob Pelinka won the Luka Doncic trade. He deserves credit for his role in that. He also deserves to be questioned for how much he gave up for Mark Williams. When you zoom out and look at the totality of his career, Pelinka loses more than he wins.
It didn't take long for him to set the record straight.