Larry Nance Jr. is hoping to clear the air on a story that made the Los Angeles Lakers and his former boss Rob Pelinka look pretty bad.
In Bill Oram’s extensive post-mortem on what went wrong when with the Lakers first season under LeBron James for The Athletic, he relayed a story in there about a conversation that former Laker Larry Nance Jr. had with Pelinka.
As the report says, Nance allegedly wanted to ask Pelinka about his standing with the team to know if he should buy a house in the Los Angeles area. Pelinka then allegedly told Nance that he wouldn’t be traded unless it was for “one of the three best players in the game,” and told him to go ahead and buy the house. Word apparently got back to Nance about the story, which he denied Tuesday morning.
NBA players, coaches and front office personnel often handle situations exactly like this. Rare is the former player or executive that will come out and publicly say “yes, I hate that guy who I worked with and he’s definitely a liar.” What Nance did happens in most businesses. It’s simple professional courtesy.
But in defense of the Lakers, Nance’s rebuttal also makes it more likely that Pelinka’s actual message may have gotten morphed through the grapevine at a time when morale within the Lakers was as low as it could be after missing the playoffs and sitting with the failure of their season.
Whatever the real story is, Nance definitely helped alleviate some pressure on a Lakers franchise that has had a pretty rough few weeks. Maybe they were just due for a win.
