When Dr. Jerry Buss passed away in 2013, he left the Los Angeles Lakers to his six children, but stipulated that his daughter Jeanie would be the controlling owner, with complete and total oversight of all decisions as it pertains to the franchise.
In recent months, she was forced to make tough decisions involving the team’s front office. She fired her older brother Jim as president of basketball operations and also got rid of general manager Mitch Kupchak after not only a string of losing seasons, but seemingly also a loss of direction.
In order to change the path of the franchise back to its historically-winning ways, she hired Hall of Famer and Lakers legend Magic Johnson to take over as president of basketball operations. Not only does he have a special place among Los Angeles’ fans from his playing days, but he’s also a close friend to Jeanie, who, according to Bill Oram of the Orange County Register, shares a similar basketball mindset.
Oram reported that Jeanie and Magic have shared a connection since Johnson was a 20-year-old rookie with the team in 1979. On January 17, the two sat down for dinner and on that day, Buss seemingly made the decision to get rid of her brother and Kupchak.
“Earvin and I were basically raised by the same person,” she told Oram, citing her father and the impact he had on Johnson’s life as well as her own. “We see things the same way.”
“It was music to my ears,” she noted. “I could understand what his vision was. There’s something about being with like-minded people.”
A decision made by her brother and Kupchak that shocked Jeanie was spending $136 million of cap space on aging veterans Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov last summer.
“I just didn’t understand what the thought process was,” she admitted to Oram, “whether our philosophies were so far apart that I couldn’t recognize what they were doing, or they couldn’t explain it well.”
Her skepticism turned out to be warranted. Deng appeared in just 56 games, averaging career-worsts in points per game (7.6), assists (1.3), shooting percentage (38.7 percent), and minutes per game (26.5). Mozgov appeared in 54 games, averaging 7.4 points and 4.9 rebounds over 20.4 minutes per contest.
Worst of all, both players were healthy scratches on a nightly basis down the final stretch of the season despite their hefty contracts.
The first major move of Magic’s tenure in the front office was to offload Mozgov’s contract, which he did when he sent De’Angelo Russell to the Brooklyn Nets in exchange for Brook Lopez. The team will be forced to deal with Deng’s contract moving forward, however, as he’s entering the second year of his four-year, $72 million deal as a 32-year-old injury-prone forward.
Now that Johnson is in place and Jeanie is still in control, it seems as though the organization will take on a philosophy that matches her way of thinking. Whether or not that amounts to more wins remains to be seen, but based on her tough decision-making abilities that she’s made recently, she certainly earned her place among the most powerful women in the sports world.