Rob Pelinka's Story About Kobe Bryant Meeting Heath Ledger After Being Inspired By Ledger In The Dark Knight Is Fascinating (Mostly Because Ledger Had To Be Dead When The Meeting Took Place)
So Reags blogged a little about the new article on ESPN absolutely destroying the Lakers front office for being a full-blown circus. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out as it appears to offer an in-depth look of an NBA banner franchise being run into the ground. This story however was my personal favorite of the entire mess:
Pelinka’s penchant for “storytelling,” multiple Lakers staffers told ESPN, is viewed as disingenuous — at best. One story shared around the organization unfolded in March 2018, when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was addressing the team at the Lakers’ practice facility as part of the franchise’s “Genius Talks” series. Standing beside Johnson, Pelinka told a story about his former client, Bryant. “There was one time when Kobe, who I worked with for 18 years, was going back to play in Madison Square Garden, and he had just seen ‘The Dark Knight,'” Pelinka said. “Obviously, you guys saw that movie, and he’s like, ‘Hey, hook me up with dinner with Heath Ledger, because he got so locked into that role. I want to know how he mentally went there.’ So, he had dinner with Heath, and he talked about how he locks in for a role. And Kobe used some of that in his game against the Knicks.”
The only problem with this story?
“The Dark Knight” was released in July 2008, six months after Ledger died. A source with direct knowledge said no such arrangement was made and no dinner ever took place.
Knicks fans after reading about a big market NBA team’s front office with cap space and a Top 5 pick being an absolute shitshow right before free agency begins and it somehow not being the Knicks:
Jesus Christ, the Lakers are really a fucking disaster, huh? I thought their President abruptly quitting because he wanted to resume his career of being the greatest tweeter of all-time was bad enough (for the record, he’s still crushing it).
But now their GM is allegedly making up stories about a legendary player meeting a legendary actor who infamously died months before his legendary performance in a legendary movie. To The Rock no less! I’m sure there are some extremely crazy Kobe Stans (not that there are any other kinds of Kobe Stans) that are out defending this mess by saying Kobe actually summoned Heath Ledger’s spirit because he has that Mamba Mentality or somehow watched a screener despite none of the Knicks/Lakers games at MSG supporting this theory.
But for anyone with a functional brain, it’s wild to see a once proud franchise like the Lakers become a crazy, dysfunctional tire fire. And I am a Knicks fan whose team specializes in crazy dysfunctional tire fires. How can any superstar that is a free agent or hypothetically demanding a trade ask to go to a team with this type of nonsense going on at the top of the org chart? Like Heath Ledger told me last week “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos”. And that’s exactly what the Lakers have become. Pure chaos. And not the good kind that can be a ladder either. But the bad kind that acts as a slide that can have your franchise ending up as a laughingstock at the bottom of the NBA. You just hate to see it. Hopefully this causes another dozen or so Lakers fans to make their voices heard yet again because this protest was fucking priceless.