Jeanie Buss Discussion: Following In Dad's Footsteps

Absolutely. I’m not mad at the younger brothers for trying to honor their old man and keep the franchise in the family.

But as a fan, this chapter can’t close fast enough.

 

Ehh. Fifth hand info so do what you want with it but if Rob wants to be here past Jeannie he should probably make sure things are good with Magic.


Jeannie looked out for her team in the deal well aware that the clocks ticking loudly on all of them.


I remain in the “just clean house and start fresh” camp.


It’s an absolute miracle we are where we are with the level of disfunction in that front office.

 

define irony, though. because what qualifications does magic have as FO guy beyond being trusted by walter?

and i'm being serious: do you want magic having input on any front office decisions--even whom to hire for the front office? nothing i've seen from him suggests he knows what he's doing in this regard. this is not jerry west.

 

Please no Magic again

 

Magic is good at airing dirty laundry and felt he was backstabbed! He made the best trade ever by dumping Zubac for Muscala! What a lowlight in Lakers history





Thank god we won after getting AD. Otherwise, this franchise would've sank further and further into the ground.

 

Exactly. No hard feelings, towards any of them, not even Jim, but please just leave and take the Rambii with you. I also have a soft spot fot the younger Buss brothers, they seem to have done a good job and cared for Jerry's legacy, but it's just time to let go.

 

Magic is probably worse than the Rambii, and I have no clue what they're responsible for. For now I choose to stay optimistic and assume the new ownership is smart enough to not make ANY decisions based on Earwin's advice.

 

I never wanted Magic or Rob and spent the whole summer arguing about it with Vash. Good times lol.

But both were brought in based on Laker ties and I didn’t like it. Neither has experience in their roles and I wanted a group who could hit the ground running without needing to learn on the job.

Hoping we can do things the right way with professionals from top to bottom who can do their jobs without finger pointing or dating the head coach.

All that said, Magic has had “input” for awhile and never really left in that sense. He WILL be involved with this transition but not in a leadership role so that doesn’t bother me much. He’s fine for helping pitch talent and being an ambassador of sorts for the team. He shouldn’t be running the club.

 

100% this

It's never personal, it's just business

And it should be treated that way always

 

He was the sole reason why we didn’t get Paul George from Indy AND why they won’t even consider trading with us anytime soon.
Don’t you remember him blabbing his big mouth off about it on a talk show?
He’s been nothing short of awful with all his “helping out” that he has done over the past decade and change.
Sure, he can help lure free agents, just as long as he doesn’t talk about it afterwards on talk shows or podcasts.
Zubac for Muscala!!!!!!!!

 

I tried reading the article but couldn’t get through it. Read like the Enquirer.

My only comment is the “You should have never been born” quote. Maybe Jeannie is a terrible person. I’m not attached to her and wanted her to sell for a while.

However, I read that as a private conversation between her and her younger brother. The article referenced “multiple people with knowledge of the call.”

Sounds like the multiple people with knowledge is just Jesse’s word and what he told people. Based on how the younger brothers are trying to burn the house down on the way out, I’m taking anything from them with a grain of salt.

Ready to move on from the Buss family altogether, but articles like these aren’t conjuring sympathy for any of the brothers.

 

Meh: a bunch of people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths who can't figure meaning in their coddled lives because they've done s*** compared to their dad.
Happens but the annoying things is no one wants to say it, but part of the reason they did't want to give up the Lakers is the cache, the facetime with stars who come to games, hell the Laker girls.
It's just not the same as the Kings or Pelicans. You become a de facto star as an owner of the Lakers.

 

Well actually…Paul George was on Rob who got caught tampering after the league had already told us to knock it off.

We don’t get LeBron without him which also means no AD.

We were not keeping Zubac. So while I didn’t like the Zubac trade as we could have gotten more for him, I honestly think it’s been a bit overblown over the years and letting Brook walk when he wanted to stay was actually worse. Even if we do consider it a job killer, Rob was the GM so his hands are also dirty on that and it’s just another reason to escort him out the building and start over.

And I completely reject the notion that Rob had no power in any of the bad deals but if he didn’t and was just going along with things that may be even worse.

I’m old enough to remember a very powerful guy who was insane enough to suggest trading Kobe Bryant. The GM wasnt perfect but fortunately told Phil Jackson no. Another crazy guy with an insane ego wanted to get rid of Scottie Pippen, but again someone had the balls to tell Michael Jordan that wasn’t a good idea. If anyone had issue with that Zubac trade they should’ve spoken up. If they didn’t then it’s on them too as far as I’m concerned.

Magic won’t be running the team but he has Walter’s ear and anyone who is trying to stick around might want to make sure things are good with him. That’s all I got on it.

 

i was going to post that initially but figured people would get mad. i highly doubt that quote was delivered in the manner the article suggests. part of why i don't believe that is that i read the whole article.

i think it was both. and it was really bad. nobody talks about it, but if you pull a power move like that, you better be ready to finish it off. at the time i thought we should have made a bigger offer after getting PG to basically demand a trade to us. then we didn't put everything on the table, they got a better offer, and both PG and us lost. pretty sure that's why george didn't join us in FA, too. though i'd argue he didn't quite hold up his end of that bargain. anyway, i don't know why magic is exonerated in that one as it seemed clear he was involved by his own comments, iirc.

not sure i buy this story. nobody gives rob (or jeanie, i guess?) any credit for lebron coming here, but it was magic's pitch that did it? this article claims lebron told us long before that conversation that he was coming to the lakers. i tend to believe that lebron just picked us himself, no recruiting involved. my controversial opinion here is that jeanie maybe DOES deserve some credit for that. in that she ousted jim, and i think if jim was still running things, lebron wouldn't have come here.

this is another story (like magic recruiting lebron) that's become fact over time but...i'm not sure about it. i get why people said it was unlikely, but i don't think it was a foregone conclusion (or should have been). he was on a low salary, and we had some degree of bird rights, iirc. that's not the kind of situation that necessarily forces your hand.

i mean, it's obvious he went for the westbrook deal because had he not he would have dealt with a full year-plus of lebron and his agent just incessantly whining in the media about needing a high-level veteran ballhandler or whatever. should he have just gone with the deal he negotiated? i think so. and he could have used that as the explanation, too--i can't back out of my agreement with sacramento at this stage. that was bad, and part of why sac (who has half a roster of guys we could use and is ready to trade them all) won't talk to us today. so, yeah, he had a part in that for sure, but i also think people REALLY underestimate how hard it is to deal with lebron. rob will deserve some credit next year when we should be the first franchise lebron doesn't leave in smoking ruins (sorry, lebron fans, that one's just a fact).

i've always maintained that rob's klutch gambit cut both ways. he deserves credit for getting AD but deserves blame for letting lebron and AD exert the kind of internal power that yields the unholy westbrook trade. rob's strategy got a ring and was successful enough that the knicks just straight up plagiarized it with a different agency to similar positive effect. it's run its course now, and rob's actually done a decent job extracting us from it (it's been a little ugly and will get uglier, though).

i've also maintained that rob will probably go out the door with klutch. i think it's likely, and i think it's probably best. but if he does stay on, i'm not worried that he's some idiot who will ruin things. i just don't see the evidence for this. in fact, it's becoming pretty clear who some of the internal folks leaking the anti-rob stuff probably were.

i believe you, but from where i sit, magic is linda rambis (someone with influence who shouldn't have it).

 

Even if Jeannie feels this way. Its better to keep it in house.

 

Bingo! Once again, I agree with ALL of this.
We all know that LeBron had very few high profile franchises that he would even choose to play for. He also wanted a spot where his kids would love to live and go to school. For me, that leaves only two destinations: Los Angeles and NYC. Furthermore, this move was more about increasing his brand. No better place than LA. He chose a team not set up to win- one in shambles that couldn’t even land meetings with high profile free agents. This was a business decision that he made regardless of Magic’s pitch.
As for Rob, wasn’t he the GM that was applauded loudly from everyone after the Bubble win because of improving the team that summer? Wasn’t he the guy who masterfully got us out of the Westbrick debacle? Wasn’t he the guy who just traded for the leading scorer(and top three player) last season? Yes, he takes some of the blame for the Brick trade, but we all know how much power LeBron and his agency held then, so for me, the blame for that trade lies at 50/50, Rob and LeBron. Rob hasn’t been Jerry West, but he also hasn’t been as bad as most whine about.
I too think he will be gone once the Walter group finds the team that will replace him.

 

(...one moment you're eating lunch and the next you are defending Magic of all people as an executive. The internet can really put you in some tough spots sometimes....lol)


To kind of answer everything at once, my overall thought is that ideally, yes, the blame and credit for wins and losses should be shared among all the key players in an organization. But we see over and over again one person getting credited for this and another getting credit for that and it just reflects the overall poor organizational structure the front office has been under for too long.

And to be clear, that's more on Jeannie IMO than anyone else.

Does Presti really do everything in OKC? No. Of course not, but his role is clear and he's the leader who takes bullets when you need to and gets credit when it goes well.

Bringing in two people in positions of power who had never served in that capacity was bound to have issues from a number of angles which was why I was always against it. They don't know the basic ins and outs of their roles much less if they can actually get along and work together. Jeannie's number one thing was always whether or not she knows you and that's a problem.

Fortunately, that aspect of things should be in our rear view mirror relatively soon.

Side note - I will touch on the Magic as a pitch man angle a bit though as I do think he will have some involvement in that capacity moving forward. While I definitely don't dismiss Jeannie helping sell a new vision of the Lakers to Klutch as a whole and Rob playing his role, I definitely trust my source on Magic carrying the load on that one. I won't rehash it all because it was dark times that most of us remember, but between our pursuits of Aldridge and Greg Monroe we were absolutely in the toilet with pitching free agents. Jeannie directly went to him for help which, IMO, was the right call and it worked.

She just should have kept him in that lane.

But, if it makes it any better, my understanding is that he did at least genuinely learn from that whole fiasco.

We will see.

He hasn't been really tweeting about us though has he?