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Like others his age, Can Pelister lives with his parents and can’t stop listening to Drake’s latest album. He likes going to movies, eating out and cheering for the local soccer club.
“A typical 20-year-old kid,” Pelister said last week while sitting inside a bustling Istanbul café.
He is working his way through a local university, with plans for a degree in sports management. But his job makes that pretty tricky.
He is an international scout for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Pelister, whose birthday was just last month, is younger than Lonzo Ball, who will be 21 in October, and two-thirds of the players drafted in June. But if 20-year-olds can be counted on to help NBA teams in the playoffs — Jayson Tatum, anyone? — Pelister has proved they can contribute behind the scenes, as well.
Believed to be the youngest full-time scout in the NBA, Pelister will have traveled to 25 different countries by the end of this summer, bouncing from continent to continent to study prospects and draft reports that he sends back around the globe to L.A. When he spoke to The Athletic, he had just returned from the Under-17 Basketball World Cup in Argentina and was making a quick stop at home in Turkey before moving on to Bulgaria for the U-20 championships.
“It’s really a blessing to work for the greatest franchise in NBA history and to be a voice for them in Europe,” Pelister told The Athletic. “It is something I really wanted to do.”
Pelister joined the rest of the Lakers scouts in Los Angeles in June to help the front office with final draft preparations. He had never even been to the United States, and here he was in meetings with Magic Johnson and looking up at the Lakers’ championship trophies. He sat in workouts alongside colleagues like former NBA All-Star Antawn Jamison, now a Lakers scout based out of Charlotte, and 92-year-old Bill Bertka, likely the NBA’s oldest scout.
“That was a world that he has seen on TV and in magazines, and then suddenly he is there,” said Antonio Maceiras, the Lakers’ senior international scout, who recommended Pelister for his position.
On June 21, Pelister sat around a conference room table with the other scouts, as the Lakers kept updating their draft board. When the 25th pick rolled around, Johnson and Rob Pelinka pushed for Michigan’s Moritz Wagner, who Pelister had scouted with Germany’s national team. With pick 39, it was Isaac Bonga, a German teenager he had scouted extensively. Finally, with the 47th pick, the Lakers selected Svi Mykhailiuk, a versatile shooting guard from Ukraine.
Three European-born players, all prospects whom Pelister had watched closely since he was just a 15-year-old with a blog. In the previous five drafts, the Lakers had drafted only one foreign player, plucking Ivica Zubac out of Croatia in the second round in 2016.
Scouting is a job of looking forward, not back. When Pelister flew on to the next tournament after the draft to scout players who will be draft eligible in future years, he stayed up late each night in cities like Rosario and Sofia to watch the Lakers’ draft picks play in summer league. Wagner showed off a deft shooting touch in Sacramento, while in Las Vegas, Bonga made his debut and Mykhailiuk outperformed most lottery picks to earn a spot on the all-tournament team.
“It has been great,” Pelister said. “I mean, I have been following all those guys, my age guys, since I was 15.”
Pelister joined the Lakers in October, after assistant general manager Jesse Buss approached first-year GM Pelinka about bolstering the organization’s international presence. Since 2012, Maceiras has been the team’s lone conduit in Europe. But as the game has flourished overseas, the amount of resources NBA teams devote to scouting outside the U.S. has followed suit.
At the start of last season, NBA rosters featured a record 108 international players from 42 countries.
“There’s just so much basketball to cover,” Buss said, “especially with the growth of basketball, not just in Europe, but all around the world.”
Maceiras became acquainted with Pelister on periodic scouting trips to Turkey, when the then-teenager would offer to host him.
“I did that with a lot of NBA teams,” Pelister said. “I was just a kid who wanted to get his feet into NBA, so I was talking to everybody, presenting myself, sending my reports. I was just very active. Wanted to work in the NBA eventually.”
An admired former executive in the Spanish ACB, Maceiras has made a career out of identifying talent early. He recommended Pelister for the job, despite other candidates being twice his age. At the time, Pelister was in his first year at Bilgi University, where he had earned a full scholarship.
“When they hired me, when news came out, everybody was (saying), ‘How come a 19-year-old kid gets this job?'” Pelister said.
In his interview, he faced a favorable panel. Before Buss coordinated the Lakers’ scouting department, his own career began at 18 when Bertka assigned him a Loyola Marymount game and Iggy the Lion, the school’s mascot, picked on him for being so young.
“Even more so than me, I think he was more prepared for the job, given his experience going to games over in Europe,” Buss said of Pelister. “He started really young.”
Buss describes Pelister like he might a young player he is scouting. “Lot of upside,” he said.
Pelister grew up loving and playing basketball. His favorite team was the Lakers and his email address, he said, included “kobebryant24.” In 2012, when Pelister was 14, he launched a blog as a portal for his opinions on the European teams he followed.
TrendBasket was born.
“I was just writing about basketball, commenting, social media and started like that,” Pelister said.
A year later, despite concerns from his parents, Pelister paid his own way to the U-16 European championships in Kiev, Ukraine. He traveled by himself and stayed in a hostel. For five days, he watched and interviewed young European stars like Dragan Bender, Ante Zizic and a young Ukrainian guard named Sviatoslav.
“Svi was a guy that really emerged in that tournament,” Pelister said, “and all the best teams in Europe went after him – Barcelona, Real Madrid. They offered him deals. Individually, Svi was probably [one of] the best players of that tournament.”
Mykhailiuk was named to the all-tournament team. Pelister interviewed him for a story on his website.
“Ukraine is generally a country that produces long players in NBA: like (Slava) Kravtsov, (Kyrylo) Fesenko, (Oleksiy) Pecherov,” Pelister wrote for TrendBasket. “They never produced a (shooting guard) at the top level in NBA. However, Mykhailiuk seems to be the first.”
It was in Kiev that Pelister first encountered professional scouts and realized it was a career he could pursue. He quickly set to networking, which led to opportunities assisting scouting services that needed a presence in Turkey. He provided reports for college programs like Arizona and Gonzaga.
“Still I wasn’t getting paid,” Pelister said, “and at the same time I was trying to keep up with my school. I was in high school.”
A consulting position with Wasserman, the agency that represents Bonga, followed. He continued to write for various international scouting sites, establishing himself as a knowledgeable source on the European game.
Along the way, Pelister regularly encountered people who were surprised by his age. He leaned on something former Indiana University coach Tom Crean told him: “Let your age be a badge of strength and not a burden. Never apologize for how hard you work at your age.”
Maceiras grew more impressed with each encounter with Pelister.
“He was very sharp,” Maceiras said. “He was attending tournaments. He was pretty well-informed.”
At the end of the NBA season, Maceiras and Pelister organized a trip to Europe for Buss and Pelinka that allowed the Lakers executives to see all of their top targets in June’s draft, including Bonga, the 6-foot-9 point guard who played for Skyliners Frankfurt at the time.
“When Rob and I went overseas it allowed us to really view the landscape of European basketball,” Buss said. “Not only for this draft and future drafts but for possible additions to our team in the future.”
While the Lakers’ primary scouting efforts on Wagner and Mykhailiuk were done in the college ranks, Maceiras and Pelister were instrumental in steering the Lakers toward Bonga, according to Buss.
“I think I went to Frankfurt seven or eight times,” Pelister said. “Spending time with the people around him (Bonga), seeing games, bad games, good games, OK games.”
And then when he was in L.A., Pelister saw the fruit of that labor. The Lakers traded cash and a 2019 second-round pick to Philadelphia for the No. 39 pick, with the intent of drafting Bonga.
“Really thought his upside was pretty high,” Pelister said. “I believe that this is a guy who in time can be a really special player.”
When it comes to their European prospects – those who do their work on the court and the one who stays out of view – the Lakers are playing the long game.
