Worth a shot: The zany story of Marc Gasol’s draft, trade and reunion with the Lakers
Scarlett Howard 
Mitch Kupchak was always particular about draft night. And he demanded calm in the moments before he called in each Lakers pick.
Adam Filippi knew this. He had been through half a dozen of these already. But on June 28, 2007, Kupchak had not yet announced what the Lakers were doing with the 48th pick, and as the Lakers’ scouts huddled around Kupchak’s office door, the team’s 35-year-old director of international scouting simply could not help himself.
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“We’re going with Marc, right?” Filippi blurted. “We’re going with Marc?”
Kupchak shot him an icy stare. It was a look, Filippi would later remember, that seemed to say, “Adam, mind your own fucking business.”
Finally, the longtime Lakers general manager replied, “We’re going by the board.”
The board was Kupchak’s bible. He trusted the board. It had guided many successful draft picks over the years.
The names of the top 60 prospects in the draft had been written on a dry erase board in the war room inside the Lakers’ El Segundo, Calif., practice facility. They were color-coordinated by class year. When a player was picked, that name was crossed off.
“Mitch liked to say the secretary could do the draft,” former assistant general manager Ronnie Lester said. “All she had to do was look at the board, see who was left and take that player.”
Filippi cast an anxious glance at the board and sighed with relief when he saw the highest remaining name was written in green.
Green was the color for international players.
It read: Marc Gasol.
Kupchak made the pick.
It is a well-known footnote of NBA history that before Marc Gasol became a three-time All-Star, first-team All-NBA center, Defensive Player of the Year and NBA champion with the Toronto Raptors that he was first drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, and then, before ever playing a game for them, traded to Memphis for his All-Star brother, Pau.
“When we drafted him,” said Kupchak, now the president of basketball operations of the Charlotte Hornets, “he was still overweight and, at best, was a diamond in the rough. At very best.”
So, how did Marc Gasol become a Laker way back in 2007? Did a front office that was in the middle of a war over Kobe Bryant’s trade demand have the bandwidth to know what it was getting with the 48th pick? That this chunky, floppy-haired, younger brother of an All-Star had the potential to turn into one of the greatest big men of the era?
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Or did they just get lucky?
Once the Gasol brothers were traded for each other, the answer to those questions never seemed particularly relevant. No one ever asked. It probably would have been lost to history, the sort of thing that gets told occasionally at dinner parties, had Gasol not signed a free-agent contract in November 2020 that reunited him with the franchise that selected him more than 13 years earlier.
The story of that pick starts at a high school tournament in Virginia and criss-crosses the Atlantic Ocean several times, with stops in Barcelona, Memphis, Los Angeles and, most improbably of all, an island off the coast of Spain where people go to get lost, not to be discovered.
And yet, that’s exactly where the NBA’s next great center was at the exact moment Kupchak reached for his phone and made Filippi the happiest scout in the world: In Ibiza, good and drunk and tired of waiting to hear his name called, with no clue what was happening half a world away.
Gasol told this part of the story with a lopsided, rueful smile.
“Don’t make it all about the shots,” he said.
Any series of poor choices must start with one fateful decision.
That helps explain how, not long before the sun came up over the Mediterranean, a 22-year-old Marc Gasol came to be passed out in a rented house when his brother Pau, somehow still upright, tried to rouse him from his slumber to deliver the good news.
The Gasol brothers were on their annual retreat with a group that included their national team buddy Juan Carlos Navarro. Each June, the Spaniards gathered on the island paradise known for its booze-fueled beach parties. They rented a house, and sometimes a boat, and tried to decompress from their respective seasons: Navarro and Marc with their Spanish clubs, and Pau with the Memphis Grizzlies.
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The night of June 28 started off innocently enough. Gasol was eligible for the NBA Draft that was being staged at Madison Square Garden, but was not particularly invested in the results.
His contract in Barcelona prevented him from attending any pre-draft workouts in the United States and, despite Pau’s success in Memphis, Marc had never really considered himself an NBA player.
Ibiza is six hours ahead of New York and Gasol was just settling in for dinner close to midnight, as is European custom, when his agent called to say that San Antonio was strongly considering taking him with the 28th pick.
“Up to that point I didn’t really care much about it,” Gasol said, “and then when the competitive nature kicks in and you’re like, ‘OK, let’s see where I’m at and see what people think of me a little bit.’
“And yeah, that’s how it all started.”
But the Spurs did not draft Gasol. They used their pick on another international big man, Tiago Splitter, who was available despite projections he would go higher in the draft.
This was when one of the world’s most cerebral basketball minds got an idea.
A very, very stupid idea.
Blame it on the wine that had been served with dinner and continued to flow well after it was over. This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the burden of youthful indiscretion was laid at the feet of too much vino.
The Spurs’ unintentional slight had awakened in Gasol a sudden, stubborn self-interest in the proceedings six time zones away.
“I’m like, ‘Let’s do a shot every time I’m not taken,’” Gasol recalled.
Shots of which spirit, Gasol is not certain. That is but the first hazy memory of a night that was only going to get tougher to piece together as the draft wore on.
The group watched as then-Commissioner David Stern came to the podium for the 29th pick. Then the 30th.
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And in the second round, when his deputy, Adam Silver, took over, names kept coming off the board.
Carl Landry … Gabe Pruitt … Marcus Williams
“It’s getting bad,” Gasol said. “It’s getting worse.”
Josh McRoberts … Kyrylo Fesenko … Stanko Barac.
There was a chance Gasol wouldn’t get picked at all.
His agent called to say Los Angeles might be interested at No. 40, but he then watched as the Lakers chose Sun Yue, a 6-foot-7 guard, instead.
“I remember that pick!” Gasol said, triumphantly “I was still around at that pick. I remember they called him ‘the Chinese Magic Johnson’ (on TV). And me and Pau, we were like, ‘What are we doing? Who is this?’”
Gasol and his comrades dutifully raised a glass to each draftee and hoped for a different outcome each time Silver appeared.
“I’m a big guy,” Gasol said, “I can hold myself.”
Until, finally, he couldn’t
“By the time the 48th pick came around,” he said, “I was already out.”
If the Gasols were scratching their heads over the Lakers selection of Sun Yue, Filippi was ready to pull his hair out.
By the summer of 2007, Filippi had led the Lakers international scouting efforts for six years. A former player in the Italian pro leagues, Filippi had become one of the youngest scouts in the league with the New Jersey Nets in the late-1990s. He joined the Lakers as a consultant at a time that interest in Europeans was booming thanks to the success of players such as Dirk Nowitzki and Peja Stojakovic.
Based out of Bologna, Filippi had played a key role in the Lakers selection of Sasha Vujacic, the No. 27 pick in the 2004 draft who would go on to be a valuable role player for two Lakers title runs. Now, he believed the Lakers had a chance to draft another impact player from Europe.
Filippi had kept an eye on Gasol for half a dozen years, ever since he played two years in high school in Memphis early in his brother’s stint with the Grizzlies. He first saw him play in a tournament in Newport News, Va.
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“He was the complete opposite body type of Pau,” said Filippi, who is now a pro scout for the Sacramento Kings. “He was real overweight, not athletic at all. You could see that he knew how to play and he had good hands, and that was obviously a plus. But he was running free throw line to free throw line at that age.”
Said Kupchak: “He was not considered a prospect in high school. At least not a high-level prospect.”
After languishing for a few years on the bench with FC Barcelona, Gasol was loaned out to a team in nearby Girona. And there, Filippi saw a player who had trimmed down and looked, to him, like an NBA prospect.
“It’s too easy to take credit now and say I saw this coming,” Filippi said. “But I had him as a player you would take in the late first round. So, like, if he was available at 25, that would have been a hell of a pick. That’s where I had him.”
The other Lakers scout to see Gasol in person before the draft was Lester.
“(Filippi) probably had more to do with us drafting Marc than anybody on our staff,” Lester said.
The Lakers already had Andrew Bynum, who in his first full season had shown flashes of becoming a star. The Lakers were not looking to replace him with Gasol.
“We’re thinking his projection would be as a very good backup center,” Filippi said. “He also had a very big contract, so it was like chances are if you draft him you’re going to leave him in Europe two more years and then you bring him over and you’ve got your backup center to Andrew Bynum. I think that’s how we were looking at it at the time.”
Gasol just had to get to them.
The Lakers owned the 19th, 40th and 48th picks in the draft. They used their first-round pick on Javaris Crittenton, a guard from Georgia Tech.
“I don’t want to look smarter than I am,” Filippi said. “If we were that smart we would have taken (Gasol) at 19 instead of Crittenton.”
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Gasol slipped past the Spurs, which surprised Gasol and his representatives.
“They showed a lot of interest,” said Herb Rudoy, Gasol’s agent at the time.
But Filippi was worried about the team with the 29th pick: the Portland Trail Blazers.
He happened to know that they were interested in Gasol, too. He had a good source. His brother, Jason, was Portland’s European scout. They often traveled to games together.
“That’s who he wanted,” Filippi said. “He tried to get them to pick Marc.”
But the Blazers had just drafted Greg Oden with the first overall pick. What would it say if they chose another center? Besides, a Finnish point guard named Petteri Koponen had had a great workout.
So Gasol kept falling. And falling.
All the way to No. 40.
“I thought it was a no-brainer to take Marc there,” Filippi said.
He was about to be disappointed.
“Sun Yue had played in the pre-draft camp and played pretty well,” Lester said, “and we had probably a fresher impression of him than we had of Marc, having seen him more recently.”
Sun would spend just one season with the Lakers, playing all of 28 minutes and scoring six total points two seasons after being drafted. But at that moment, he was a natural fit for a system that had always targeted big guards who could run Phil Jackson’s Triangle offense.
Filippi was beyond belief and thought they had let Gasol get away.
“I never thought Marc would have been there at 48,” he said.
It turned out that Filippi wasn’t the only one in the Lakers organization with an interest in Gasol.
Jim Buss, the second son of late owner Dr. Jerry Buss and then the team’s vice president of player personnel, had already become fond of Pau Gasol, who was still a year away from joining the Lakers.
“It was the bloodline,” former Lakers scout Chaz Osborne said. “I think Jim mostly based it on what he saw from Pau and what he thought Pau was going to be, and he thought if this brother is going to be anything close to that we’ve got a steal in the second round.”
Soon, the Lakers were on the clock again and Gasol, sleeping peacefully on the other side of the globe, was somehow still available.
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And then he wasn’t.
“There was not any conversation with the Lakers before the draft,” Rudoy said. “It was a surprise to me when they drafted Marc. I am sure that Marc was also surprised.”
DraftExpress gave the Lakers a C for their draft, calling Gasol a “legit, albeit slightly outdated, talent” who “could very well be a solid rotation player when the Lakers decide to call on him in a year or two.”
The story in the next morning’s edition of the Los Angeles Times, written by beat writer Mike Bresnahan, began, “History will show that the Lakers definitely took a player in the first round of Thursday’s NBA Draft, but the talk at their practice facility centered on somebody else.”
This was not a reference to Gasol, but to Bryant, whom the newspaper’s headline referred to as a “disgruntled star.”
One had to read for 20 paragraphs before finding any mention of Gasol.
“The Lakers then took 6-7 ¾ Chinese guard Sun Yue with the 40th pick and Spanish center Marc Gasol with the 48th pick,” Bresnahan’s story continued. “Gasol, the 22-year-old brother of Memphis power forward Pau Gasol, averaged 10.8 points and 5.6 rebounds last season with Akasvayu Girona in Spain.”
That was the last time his name appeared in the newspaper for 218 more days. Then, on Feb. 2, 2008, on the front of the sports section, the Times ran a six-column headline: “A nice Spanish acquisition.”
This was also not about Marc Gasol.
His brother was a Laker, acquired for a collection of draft picks and players that included Crittenton and Kwame Brown.
Buried in Bresnahan’s ninth paragraph was this tidbit: “In addition to Brown, who never lived up to the promise of being the top pick in the 2001 draft, and Crittenton, a rookie who was intriguing in spurts, the Lakers gave up the rights to Marc Gasol, who was one of their second-round picks last year and who is Pau’s younger brother.”
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Marc Gasol departed Los Angeles just as quietly as he had arrived.
In the eight months that Gasol was technically a Laker, Filippi’s visits to Girona became more frequent.
“Every couple weeks he would check in,” Gasol said, “and he always was very positive and telling me, ‘I’m pushing for you to come over.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t really know if I’m coming over.’ … I knew what my chances were at the 48th pick of making it to the league.”
The Lakers sent him a crate of Lakers sweats and t-shirts in his size, 5XL, but he never really wore them.
Gasol’s apparent apathy toward the NBA did nothing to dampen Filippi’s enthusiasm.
“He had gone through a monster physical change,” Filippi said. “He had changed the body composition. He was more trimmed and his confidence had skyrocketed.”
The dispatches from Europe grew increasingly urgent.
“Every time I’d see him there those first few months of that season, I was like, ‘Guys, this guy is going to be really good. Like, starter good,’” Filippi said. “I never thought he was going to be starter good until we drafted him.
“He started looking like Sabonis all the sudden.”
Filippi had reason to be excited. Gasol would go on to be named the Most Valuable Player of the Spanish ACB, generally regarded as the second-best league in the world.
Then, one day in February, Gasol got a phone call from Navarro, his national team friend, who had played with Pau in Memphis that season.
“I remember I was grocery shopping and he said, ‘Hey, Pau just got traded,’” Gasol said.
This was not a surprise. Pau had been unhappy and momentum had been building toward a trade. The Grizzlies had drafted Rudy Gay in 2006 and were ready to try a new approach.
Gasol asked where his brother was headed. Navarro told him the Lakers.
“Oh, shit,” Gasol remembered thinking. “That’s nice. He’s gonna play with Kobe. I thought immediately of Lamar Odom, the Triangle. It’s a perfect fit. It just makes perfect sense for both.”
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Ten minutes later, Navarro called back to tell Marc he was included in the trade, also.
“I’m like, ‘What? How? I’m not even there’” Gasol said.
Navarro explained, “No, your rights got traded back to Memphis.”
For the Lakers, this had been a minor sticking point in a trade that would propel them to half a decade of championship contention.
Kupchak had been receiving Filippi’s reports, and he was not particularly eager to part with the younger Gasol.
“Memphis was, understandably, trying to hold us up,” Kupchak said. “And they wanted both Sun Yue and Marc. And ultimately I said we’ll give you one but not both. We were fighting to keep Marc. … But as successful as a player he turned out to be, I’m not sure anybody at that time, watching him play in Europe, said he’s going to be an All-Star one day. He wasn’t the linchpin of the deal.”
The trade was unpopular around the NBA, with San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, a Lakers rival, grousing that there should be a trade committee that could veto lopsided transactions.
“I remember when people started saying they got Pau Gasol for nothing,” Filippi said. “I kept telling teams, ‘You have no idea. We gave up a hell of a player.’”
For Marc Gasol, Memphis was the perfect landing spot. The whole family — parents Augusti and Marisa, and brothers Pau, Marc and Adria — had lived together for Pau’s first two years in the NBA and Marc played his junior and senior years of high school at Lausanne Collegiate School in Memphis before he left to play professionally back home in Spain.
The idea of returning to a place he had previously called home made a jump to the NBA much more palatable for Gasol. On July 9, 2008, he signed with the Grizzlies.
“My parents still lived in Memphis,” he said. “That was awesome. That helped me a lot, a city that I was comfortable with.”
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Pau, playing next to a pacified Kobe, helped the Lakers reach the Finals in each of his first three seasons in L.A., with the tandem of stars hanging banners in 2009 and 2010. While he became a centerpiece of title runs in Hollywood, his younger brother was carving his own path in the city where Pau had first become an All-Star.
By Marc’s fourth season, he was a Western Conference All-Star himself. The following year, he was voted the league’s best defensive player, edging out LeBron James.
Time was proving that the 48th pick in the 2007 draft was in fact that draft’s second-best player, ranking only behind Kevin Durant.
“That trade was a great deal because it worked for both teams,” Filippi said. “Memphis was in a place where they needed to rebuild, so Marc was great for that. And the Lakers needed to win a championship and Pau was great for that.
“So, the rest is history. Did I think that Marc would become the best center in the league? No. Was I happy to see it happen? Absolutely.”
In 2013, the Grizzlies won playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers and Oklahoma City Thunder to advance to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in franchise history. But that was as close as they would get to a championship.
In 2019, when management began to deconstruct the “Grit and Grind” Grizzlies and build around a young and developing core, then-General Manager Chris Wallace traded Gasol to Toronto. On the day he announced the trade, Wallace called Gasol “an epitome of a Memphis Grizzly” and “as good of an ambassador of a franchise as there’s ever been in the entire history of the NBA.”
Wallace continued: “I’m happy on a personal note that he’s going to a team in this trade that has a chance to contend for a title.”
Gasol started all 24 games in the postseason for Toronto’s title run, averaging 9.4 points and 6.4 rebounds in the playoffs to become a first-time champion. It was just the beginning of the celebrating. Two months later, he was part of another championship, when he helped Spain win gold at the FIBA World Cup.
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In Gasol’s second year in Toronto, his production dropped off even more, but his value to the Raptors did not. He remained one of the league’s best defensive big men, but struggled in the league’s restart inside the Orlando bubble. After Toronto was eliminated in the second round by Boston, rumors began to spread that Gasol was considering a return to Spain to finish his career with Barcelona.
“That was not accurate at all,” Gasol told reporters last month. “I think people just tried to make that decision for me and thought that was a good time to try it. But I never stated that. Never even close to that. I never even spoke to Barcelona about it.”
It turned out a different kind of homecoming awaited.
Teams around the league still believed he had plenty to offer. That was evidenced by the Lakers trading JaVale McGee, their starting center throughout the regular season, to clear the salary room to sign Gasol to a multi-year deal.
For the second time in his career, he was following in his brother’s footsteps and returning to a place he had a certain degree of history.
“I think there’s a bunch of cool backstories for me joining the Lakers,” Gasol said, “being drafted a while ago by the team. … Watching Pau through all his years here and watching him grow as a player and grow as a man in L.A.”
Gasol finally appeared in a Lakers uniform on Tuesday night. All it took was 13 years. This was a Hall of Fame career coming full circle, with many more games still ahead. His debut in purple and gold, however, was not exactly one to remember. He got into early foul trouble, and did not return to the court after picking up his fifth personal five minutes into the third quarter. He went scoreless in his 12 minutes of action.
“He’s going to be fine,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said after the game.
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He knew from Gasol’s impact throughout the truncated preseason not to put too much stock in one rough outing.
“Marc’s been amazing,” Vogel said. “He’s a great guy to be around. … He’s a guy that gets it. He understands how the pieces fit with this team and the way our coaching staff does things and he’s been a joy to be around just on a daily basis.”
Filippi, who now lives in Miami, has spent the last six months of the pandemic with family in Bologna, doing his scouting work for the Kings remotely. Among his preseason assignments has been to watch the Lakers.
He marvels at how seamlessly Gasol, a month away from his 36th birthday, has blended in with a new group of teammates. He can’t help but think about the teenager he first saw in Virginia and the burgeoning star he watched for so many years in Spain.
He laughs at the memory of how tense he was on the night of the 2007 draft.
“I was anxious because I felt we had an opportunity to get better,” Filippi said. “Not immediately, but down the road. I knew he could be a good backup center. Everything else, that’s all just credit to him for putting in the work and getting better.
“But what a story.”
Oh, and for the record: The Gasols no longer vacation in Ibiza.
“We went there every year until we got a little bit older,” Marc said, “and we couldn’t handle it as much.”
The shots taken, he acknowledged, were “a bad decision, for sure.”
But, just like with the rest of his journey in basketball, Gasol said there was nothing he would change about his draft night experience.
“I would have liked to enjoy the process a little more,” he said, “but it’s a good memory to have with those guys.”
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic | Photos: Garrett W. Ellwood, Brian Babineau and Chris Desmond / NBAE via Getty Images)
