Rob Pelinka finishes 11th in NBA Executive of Year voting
Despite turning the Lakers into a legitimate contender midseason, Rob Pelinka was snubbed in a big way for the Executive of the Year award.
The NBA announced it’s Executive of the Year award on Tuesday and, to what should the shock of nobody, Rob Pelinka was very far down the list. Monte McNair of the Sacramento Kings took first by some margin followed by Koby Altman of the Cavaliers.
Pelinka finished a very distant 11th place, receiving one second-place and one third-place vote.
Here is NBA Executive of the Year voting (NYK’s Leon Rose & BKN’s Sean Marks received votes): pic.twitter.com/EN2LYEvD15
— Ian Begley (@IanBegley) May 3, 2023
The needed explainer is that this is an award voted on by fellow executives and, for obvious reasons centered around him being a former agent, Pelinka’s not well-liked! This isn’t the first time he’s been done a bit dirty in voting for Executive of the Year.
When the Lakers built a literal title-winning roster from the bottom up, Pelinka was rewarded with a seventh-place finish. There’s basically nothing that you can realistically take away from this award other than who is the most popular executive among his peers.
This season, Pelinka completely overhauled the roster midseason and turned the Lakers from a lottery team into a play-in team. Even accounting for the fact that voting closed at the end of the regular season, Pelinka had changed the roster over entirely on the fly and deserved some type of credit for that, even if not winning the award.
But finishing 11th behind people like Sean Marks — like really, what the hell — and Zach Kleiman is wild.
Just another reason the plucky underdog Lakers are underrated and underappreciated.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.