Jeanie Buss is passionate about her team. (USATSI)
Los Angeles Lakers president and "governor," whatever that is, Jeanie Buss had a wide-ranging interview with USA Today on Tuesday in which she discussed the state of the team, defended Kobe Bryant from accusations that he was to blame for the Lakers' inability to sign a star, and asserted that the family has no intention of selling the team. Some highlights and commentary...
On Dwight Howard, about whom she essentially just threw Mike D'Antoni under the bus:
"It's important to remember that players have a right to be a free agent in their career. Some of them exercise that right, and happily so, and some decide that they don't want to go through that process. Dwight clearly wanted to be a free agent, and he had an opportunity to weigh all the pros and cons for where he would go next. I understand that when the decision was made to hire Mike D'Antoni (instead of Jackson as coach in Nov. 2012), that he plays an offense that doesn't suit Dwight's skills, that doesn't showcase his skills in the best possible light. And that's difficult for a big man. It's difficult for any player. It would be the opposite if there was a guard who was diminished in an offense. That's kind of like a jail sentence that you don't want to have to go through, and so Dwight saw that they made a commitment to building a team around Steve Nash rather than showcasing his skills. I understand why he had to look for what was going to make him happy and take on his next challenge. It had nothing to do with Kobe Bryant. Everybody is entitled to their opinion, and that's how I see things. That's that. I stick to that. And that's the truth. That's my truth."
via Jeanie Buss: Lakers aren't a stock you should sell.
It's always fun to see an entire organization blame one guy for everything. As if the pretty well-established conflict between Howard ad Bryant just wasn't a thing. It can be about D'Antoni, that clearly was a factor. But really, throwing D'Antoini under the bus also hits her brother, who chose D'Antoni over her beau, Phil Jackson.
Buss continued later about Howard, after a weird story about championship trophies and Stan Van Gundy:
"He came with the best of intentions. He was great with the media. He was great with all of our charity, all of our events, all of our sponsors, all of our partners. He came one day because he wanted to meet all of the employees. He just wanted to meet the employees. This was a guy who came (to the Lakers), and we let him down. That's how I felt."
That's quite a different story than Byron Scott saying Howard wasn't as serious about winning a title as he did earlier this week. Maybe Buss really does recognize the special talent Howard is, or maybe this is another way to diminish her brother's control. Speaking of, what, exactly, is the relationship between the two? Jeanie was supposed to be in charge of business while her brother ran basketball, but the sister has been more and more vocal and involved in the basketball side as things have gone on. Her response?
"I think it is trying to find how we're going to operate together. I believe that Phil was a source of conflict between me and my brother and Mitch, I guess, as well. And now that Phil, as of six months ago, is now off the market and has a job -- isn't in the wings -- that source of conflict is removed. And I think that the way we operate is becoming more clear. I'm satisfied with everybody's role, and now we just need everybody to step up and do what is required of them. For me, that means stepping up and talking about the organization and being the face of the organization and establishing the clear lines of authority and transparency and, ultimately, accountability, which lies on my shoulders."
So it would certainly appear that she's prepared to take on a bigger role in the team. And Buss was adamant that the team isn't leaving her family anytime soon.
To me, the team is not for sale. My dad spent 10 years ensuring that we could keep this team, figuring out how we could do a transfer, because it's very complicated when you're passing on an asset of this size to the next generation. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of planning. And the fact that my dad did that out of a labor of love, so that this family could hold onto this team? The team is not for sale, and I will protect it and love it and nurture it and do everything in my power to make sure that we keep his vision, to what he thought this could be.
"In that (video) clip (she mentioned earlier), my dad was about the age I am now. And when you hear the passion that he had for that team -- and he hadn't even had his first game as owner just yet, but he loved it. This was everything to him, and he wanted us to keep this team in the family."
Unlike a lot of ownership groups, the Lakers are the Buss family business. And with their multibillion dollar TV deal and the new league media deal, there's no reason to sell. The Lakers could be terrible for a decade and still be amazingly lucrative. That's just how strong their brand is.
Yet you can tell from her comments that the new CBA has the team a little flustered. They're still trying to figure out how to be "the Lakers" under it, and at the same time are giving a lot of money up as part of the new revenue sharing agreement. This isn't going to be easy for the Lakers ... a lot like this season.
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