In speaking about the move, Pelinka noted that the level of trust between himself and Harrison allowed for them to slowly work through all potential issues as they popped up. “Yeah this all started with a coffee in Dallas, where Nico approached us with the concept,” Pelinka said. “And because there was a partnership and a history of traveling the world between Nico and myself, working around Kobe Bryant, there was a fabric of trust in the discussions. And these type of deals are incredibly intricate and complicated. And along the way, we knew there would be 248 insurmountable snags to get to the end. And there were. “And so over the course of three weeks, call it, an issue would come up, and we’d think there was no way to climb the mountain, and we’d figure out a way. Then the next issue would come up. And you just keep going, and you keep going and you stay committed to the work. You stay committed to trying to get the deal done in a partnership sense. I think a lot of people talk about negotiations in terms of who won and who lost. I try to approach important negotiations in the sense of how do we build a partnership where we can get to the end? And I think that was the lens that we worked and the premise we worked under. -via Lakers Nation / February 11, 2025
Stephen Curry: ‘You don’t want to be in a situation the Lakers were in those last three years with Kobe Bryant’
