Rob Pelinka Gave A Cringeworthy Speech To The Lakers About Having A Chip On Their Shoulder

Rob Pelinka has not done a good job by just about any metric in the last two years since the Lakers won the title in 2020, as he tried to completely rebuild the team around LeBron James and Anthony Davis twice while seeming to fail to learn the lessons of what worked for that championship squad.

Rather than putting shooters around LeBron and AD, he has brought in mostly non-shooters, headlined by Russell Westbrook, with the result being a cramped offense and a team that missed the playoffs (and even the play-in) last year and is off to an 0-5 start to this season. Even so, Pelinka was quietly signed to a 5-year extension this offseason to ensure stability in the organization and align his deal with Darvin Ham’s. It’s a vote of confidence in Pelinka not many Lakers fans would agree with, but for better or worse he is the leading voice in the basketball operations department.

In a bit of incredible timing, after the Lakers fell to 0-5 with a loss to the Timberwolves on Friday, Spectrum Sportsnet ran their latest episode of Backstage: Lakers, which gives fans a behind the scenes look at team meetings and more. On that episode, they show Pelinka giving a painful speech to the players about having a chip on their shoulder and taking the “I” out of things and replacing it with a we, doing so quite literally by removing the “I” in chip and replacing it with the Larry O’Brien trophy.

This is the type of motivational tactic you usually see in a college program — and even then it’d get met with plenty of eye rolls — but to try and fire up a veteran team with this is especially funny (or cringeworthy, depending on your viewpoint). I enjoy the cuts to the players just staring blankly back at Pelinka, wondering how much longer all of this is going to go. The good news for Rob is this clearly went over great and the team really bought in based off the early results this season.