data-mm-id=”_yh772blot”>The Los Angeles Lakers won their 17th NBA championship on October 11 and look like a completely different team roughly six weeks later. Somehow, the team that led the Western Conference for most of the 2019-20 season won a title in the league's Orlando bubble got much better this offseason. All credit for those marked improvements should go to Rob Pelinka. The Lakers' vice president of basketball operations and general manager was much maligned during his first few years on the job. But over the course of the last three offseasons he's proven himself one of the NBA's top executives. In 2018 he helped the Lakers land LeBron James. For an encore in 2019, he engineered a blockbuster trade that brought Anthony Davis to Los Angeles. He also deserv…