The entire NBA landscape changed back in the summer of 2003 when perennial All-Stars Gary Payton and Karl Malone teamed up and joined the Los Angeles Lakers in free agency. Although the unexpected move did leave a lot of jaws on the floor, Payton recently revealed that it was planned all along. While serving as a guest in the latest episode of the All The Smoke podcast with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, Payton shared that he and Malone have discussed playing with each other long before moving to Hollywood. “Well, you know man, it was a lot different. And the way we got to LA is because me and Karl had planned already to play with each other. We had been talking ’bout that for two all-star (games). And we said we knew that we wasn’t gonna be with our same teams for a long period of time because our owners was a little bit different, and they were trying to stay away from us a little bit. They wanted to go young. So he always told me we gonna play together,” “The Glove shared.