This weekend, former Los Angeles Lakers star big man Pau Gasol will receive the ultimate validation of his athletic career when he is inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Once he received the final vote to be inducted, the Lakers retired his No. 16 jersey during an emotional March ceremony at Crypto.com Arena.
It has been said the Lakers and the late Kobe Bryant transformed Gasol from a very good player into a great one. But it’s easy to forget Gasol also transformed and resurrected Bryant and the Lakers.
When the Spanish native arrived in L.A. in February 2008, the team had suffered through three and a half years of mediocrity following Shaquille O’Neal’s departure. Bryant, who was approaching his 30th birthday, grew extremely frustrated at the lack of progress made and demanded a trade the previous summer.
But Gasol’s arrival changed all that for good.
Mitch Kupchak, then the Lakers’ general manager, recently reflected on how the Gasol trade came together.
Gauging interest
Shortly after Bryant’s trade demand, Kupchak and the Lakers tried desperately to land Kevin Garnett, who had asked to be traded himself. But the general manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves, the team Garnett was then a member of, was Kevin McHale, the Boston Celtics Hall of Famer.
Instead of doing the Lakers a solid, McHale sent Garnett to his former team, whose general manager was Danny Ainge, McHale’s former teammate.
Los Angeles could’ve traded Andrew Bynum for All-Star big man Jermaine O’Neal, but O’Neal was injury-prone and about to start the downside of his career.
With that, the Lakers seemed to be out of options as far as improving their roster and changing Bryant’s mind. But Kupchak caught wind that maybe, just maybe, the Memphis Grizzlies had made Gasol available.
Via ESPN:
“I remember there was something written, or a rumor that he might be available, but it wasn’t the mainstream,” Mitch Kupchak, then the Lakers general manager and now the Charlotte Hornets GM, told ESPN. “So, yeah, I called up (the Grizzlies) and you can kind of tell when there’s real interest or when there’s not real interest.”
One thing that helped was the fact the Grizzlies, like the Lakers, had fallen on hard times and were looking to rebuild. So Kupchak got on the phone with Memphis general manager Chris Wallace and started negotiating.
“One of the things that we had heard was the guy, the owner, wanted to sell the team and they weren’t going anywhere,” Kupchak said. “They weren’t having a very good season. Maybe they would lose some money, I don’t know. So one of the first things we did was, with Chris, ‘We can go two ways: We could give you players that add up to Pau’s (salary) number, or if you prefer, we have a large expiring contract in Kwame Brown, right? And we can go that direction.’
“I didn’t ask him what they were trying to accomplish, I just gave them two options, and he called back and he said, ‘Hey, let’s work on the Kwame Brown option.'”
The second option was favorable to L.A.; it wouldn’t have to get rid of any players that were essential to its success.
The two teams agreed to a package of Brown, rookie Javaris Crittenton, the draft rights to Pau’s younger brother Marc Gasol, two first-round draft picks and cash.
However, there was a small problem that threatened to derail the deal.
Making the numbers add up
According to NBA rules, the incoming and outgoing salaries in a trade must approximately match. The Lakers were a bit short of matching Pau Gasol’s salary, and it looked like perhaps they had no way of getting to the required amount of outgoing salary.
“We were short a small number, but there was no way to make it work,” Kupchak said. “We just didn’t have any more players to put in.”
So Kupchak got clever. He contacted the agent of guard Aaron McKie, who had played for the Lakers the previous two seasons but was now retired, and he asked for some help.
“I said, ‘Listen, the league will allow us to sign Aaron to a rest for the season contract, and we will put him in the trade and he’d have to report in Memphis. … Would he do it?’ And I forget how much money it was, I don’t know, $600,000, $800,000 for three or four months, right?”
McKie agreed to be a part of the trade, and the trade was complete. Unlike some significant deals, there was not one peep about this one until it was signed, sealed and delivered.
The reason? Another team may have tried to sabotage it.
“Chris didn’t want it out,” Kupchak said. “We both knew if it got out, it’s not good. Just complicates things, right?
“After the fact, there was certainly a lot of people saying stuff like, ‘If we had known, we would’ve …’ But that could be sour grapes too, right?”
Shortly after the trade was announced, Gregg Popovich, the head coach of the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, complained and said there should be a “trade committee that can scratch all trades that make no sense.”
But there wasn’t, and Bryant and the Lakers were in basketball heaven.
The impact
Once the trade went down, Bryant recommitted himself to the Lakers and publicly complimented Kupchak and the rest of the front office for getting the deal done.
At the time, it seemed like Kupchak might get indicted for larceny. The trade looked extremely lopsided in L.A.’s favor, and the team’s GM said it made him “uncomfortable.”
But Marc Gasol would eventually blossom into a star in his own right, and it turned out to be a deal that helped both sides.
“At the time, it was viewed as a very lopsided deal, and it made me uncomfortable,” Kupchak explained. “I mean, obviously being on the side that got Pau, I was pleased, but you don’t want your colleagues to ever get crushed.
“There was a lot of negative pushback, but when a year or two later, all of a sudden, you have Marc Gasol who’s the starting center making the All-Star team, the deal didn’t look as lopsided then as it did maybe the first month or two.”
The Lakers were immediately reborn again with Pau Gasol. They instantly became an offensive juggernaut that averaged roughly 110 points a game for the rest of the season. With Garnett and Ray Allen making a similar impact in Boston, it gradually became clear that the two old rivals were on a collision course.
They met in the NBA Finals that June, with the Celtics pulverizing the Lakers in six games. Pau Gasol had played soft at times, leading to some mild criticism, but he infused quite a bit of passion into his game moving forward.
He and Bryant led Los Angeles to the world championship each of the next two seasons, with the team getting revenge on the Celtics in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals.
Meanwhile, Memphis would be back in the playoffs by 2011, and Marc Gasol became an All-Star the following year. He was a franchise pillar for the “Grit and Grind” era, which saw the Grizzlies reach the playoffs seven consecutive times.
The trade Kupchak and Wallace worked out clearly had quite a bit of reciprocity to it.
