And while Peterson may not have been widely known since being hired in 2024, trading Ball shined the NBA spotlight on the thick-skinned GM. “Fortunately, I don’t get on social media. I don’t really follow it or anything like that,” Peterson, who is 37, told Andscape July 11 from the Thomas & Mack Center during NBA summer league. “I do have people who will send me stuff occasionally, and most of the time it’s as a joke. It’s always funny to me how people who don’t have the full context of a situation can truly weigh in on your decision making. But it’s very thick skin.
“Look, when I ultimately made the decision to trade LaMelo, I knew that it was not going to go over well with a lot of the fanbase. I understand and respect their position on it. But the minute you start to feed into that, then you can’t do the job. It’s not that you can’t value other people’s opinion or appreciate their opinion. But if you let that weigh in too much on what you’re doing, you’ll get paralyzed.”
Andscape
