Lakers Sold To Mark Walter

For the record...It's more to the Caruso thing than it appears. It's my understanding that, once we signed Tucker instead of Caruso, signing Caruso at 10M, was going to cost another 35M in tax. 45M for Alex Caruso?That was not a smart move, the mistake was picking Tucker over Caruso in the first place.

That situation needs to be put in the proper context, that was a bad decision by Rob, not Jeanie.

 

It's like my dream came thru, i can't believe it. First Luka, now this... im starting to think the world is about to end, is there an asteroid coming i don't know about?
Bye Linda, bye Kurt... bye Rob (in a year or two at the latest). Welcome new, insane medical team and "basketball people" money can get in general. This will be great, just look at the Dodgers

 

His first order of business should be getting rid of those canary yellow jerseys.

 

https://www.silverscreenandroll.com...y-sell-mark-walter-family-siblings-jeanie-jim

 

i actually do, too, moreso than i expected. i think my hope is that someone with a ton of cash and no other interests in sports would have bought the team. really, i wanted a ballmer type (like mark cuban minus the interest in playing gm). sounds like this should solve some problems, though.

the good:

-we're done with caruso choices, hopefully forever. despite slick's longstanding attempt to distort reality, it was a false choice that nobody had to make if your ownership cared more about winning than the bottom line. only the extra luxury tax prevented us from re-signing caruso. the second apron didn't even exist at the time. the rules would have allowed us to have him, nunn, and THT at twice what he signed for! we just didn't want to pay for it. after that, you can quibble about whose fault it was or whatever, but it's a false premise to begin with. pretty sure that shouldn't be the issue anymore. like we're not going to let reaves walk over 3 million in annual salary or something. no matter who the gm is.

-we'll modernize the basketball ops and diversify the front office beyond buss family friends. this has been necessary for a very long time and wasn't possible with buss family majority ownership and jeanie with all the power.

the bad:

-timing. couldn't this have happened AFTER luka re-signed? that guy has to be wondering about things right now. who's going to be in charge of the prime of my career? can i trust them?

also, as alluded to above, sucks that we finally will be able to spend money only AFTER the second apron stuff started. all those contracts we let turn into dust really hampered our ability to compete pre-new cba. and now they will, just in a different way. you can still blow through the second apron in ways that give you advantages (see warriors and clippers up until last year), but it's not the same as it was.

-residuals. with jeanie both in charge and not in charge...what does that look like? once we got magic out, i at least knew who the players in the FO were and that they were generally pulling in the same direction. can that last? how? if the majority owners force a dennis lindsay on jeanie/rob (they should!!), how will they react? will it be another magic thing where we have people working independently with different agendas? that would be bad and a step backward.

-fan sentiment. this one is dumb and inconsequential, but i sort of enjoyed being one of the few family owned-and-operated major franchises left, sort of as a matter of pride. of course, other fans and the media never acknowledged this about the lakers. they will now that it's not the case, of course, just like they all like kobe now instead of spending 25 hours a day trying to tear down his game lol.

so now we're more like all the other major players. and practically, this is what i wanted, so i'll get over the other part.


as for the rob stuff, this changes some but not all of my thinking. when i advocated for not firing rob, i did so for a couple reasons. the first was that without ownership change, the next gm was going to be handcuffed in ways their competitors weren't. that shouldn't be the case anymore, so one reason is less important. the second reason is still there, though: expectations. i keep seeing presti bandied about, but everyone needs to understand that okc has been quite s***ty for a lot of presti's tenure. he's won 56% of his games at the helm of the thunder. almost a quarter of his seasons (4/18) were sub-25 win seasons. he had zero (0) rings until this year and made some very poor choices in ending okc's first attempt at a dynastic run (which was built tanking and getting three top-3 draft choices).

i'm just not sure the laker fan base has the tolerance required for such things. we all hated the post kobe years with the fire of 1000 suns. like, 18 months of trying to watch the young guys grow was exactly 15 months too long.

does this mean keep rob? not necessarily. it just means he at least knows what the job is and has functioned in it. what if we hire ujiri, and he favors a complete teardown? the mavs tried to bring in gersson rosas to help the supposedly aging and underperforming donnie nelson, and his first suggestion was to trade dirk nowitzki (to his former team).

iow, it can always get worse.

so yeah, i'm more in favor of moving on from rob now than i was yesterday, but i'm still not sure it's going to do what people think it will. i'm also still not sure if our job is that desirable, though at least the finance hamstring shouldn't be adding to the expectations issue.