In the good news for the Lakers, with Magic Johnson back in the loop, at least they’re going to resemble the Lakers.
For all the talk about Laker Family, a dire, just-like-everybody-else prospect was looming with a popular young coach in place and their young team struggling as young teams do, especially ones without budding superstars like Joel Embiid or Karl-Anthony Towns.
GM Mitch Kupchak would be scapegoated along with Jim Buss.
The Lakers would replace Mitch with some young hottie from some winning team. That could have meant only that Mr. Hot was in the right place at the right time so a janitor in the Spurs’ front office might get a job offer.
The hottie would likely embrace analytics, the modern mumbo-jumbo, whether he has shown he can make it work like Houston’s Daryl Morey, or is a disaster like his lieutenant, Sam Hinkie, who spent his three seasons in Philadelphia tanking. Or Orlando’s Rob Henigan, who arrived from OKC at 30 and just decided to speed up the process by trading his top prospect, Victor Oladipo, for upcoming free agent Serge Ibaka.
Then, of course, there was the Phil Jackson scenario.
We’ll never know what the Lakers would have been if Jackson and Jeanie Buss had stayed together and she had brought him back — to enhance her comfort level, as she put it when she tried to do it before he went to New York, asking her siblings for permission, only to have Jimbo protest that Phil would do nothing for his comfort level.
Jeanie, then totally consensus-minded, knowing her late father wanted them to get along, didn’t assert her power.
Of course, if the Lakers are all coming home, there’s one more they need to enlist, if he’s enlistable.
Jerry West.
Phil was perfectly inexperienced as a basketball executive when the Knicks gave him $12 million a year to work a miracle and — shocker! — look how that turned out.
For all his charisma, Magic is similarly perfectly inexperienced at running a front office.
West, of course, is the icon whom Detroit GM Scott Layden once said should have the Executive of the Year award named after him.
Actually, Magic doesn’t sound as if he’ll take over, no matter the optics or how much Lakers fans and Time Warner execs pray for it.
“I’m just looking forward to talking basketball and how can I just help you,” Johnson said on the Lakers’ cable channel, “whether you’re making a decision [or] just give you some advice, whether that’s going on the floor, or just giving you notes on what I see. …
“We have a great group of young players. I think we’re missing a leader. We have to have D’Angelo [Russell] step up to the leader role. … We’ve lost a lot of games in the fourth quarter when somebody should have stepped up and said, ‘Bad shot. Hey, slow it down. Hey, let’s do this, let’s do that.’ I think he’s the guy who has the ball in his hands and he could be a better leader than he is today.”
Good luck.
What they actually need is a major star to lead them … like, say, Johnson, who was capable of taking over when he arrived at 20. However D’Angelo turns out, he won’t be another Magic.
If Johnson isn’t back to run things, he is there to help Jeanie select the people who will with big decisions upcoming:
What to do about Jim?
The only one who really cares is Jim, whose presence is largely ceremonial.
What to do about Kupchak?
This has consequences since Mitch actually does the important stuff.
He’s on the hook for the big contracts lavished on Timofey Mogov who is, at least, a seven-footer and (oops) Luol Deng, hard as it was to pursue free agents coming from where the Lakers were.
On the plus side are the picks that brought Russell (provided he keeps progressing enough to make it OK to have passed up Kristaps Porzingis), Julius Randle (even if local kindergarten kids know he needs a right hand), Jordan Clarkson, Larry Nance Jr. and, recently, even Ivica Zubac.
Had Jeanie gone outside, the conventional wisdom would have been that Mitch had to go, if only to give the appearance of doing something, in the hope of turning over a rock and finding a genius under it.
Johnson and Kupchak go back decades, so Mitch can count on a fair appraisal with the bias tilting in his favor, as it should if “Laker Family” still means anything.
“This is big for Jeanie Buss,” said Mike Bresnahan, Time Warner’s Lakers insider. “She wanted an ally. … She has done a nice job empowering the basketball operations guys for a couple of years. Now she wants a little bit of a liaison between [basketball ops and] her position as president. Remember, she has the final say in just about everything.”
In other words, basketball ops has run autonomously with Jeanie reluctant to tread where she has no expertise … which prompted her to turn to Magic when she knew it wasn’t going to be Phil.
Jeanie has long embodied Laker Family. He father laid off all but the top three people in basketball ops before the 2011 lockout. Jeanie was the one who called Marge Hearn every day after Chick passed away.
There’s just one more Laker out there, the one with a special expertise in strategic thinking, independence and daring, the name you’ve known for all these years.
Mark Heisler has written an NBA column since 1991 and was honored with the Naismith Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award in 2006. His column is published weekly for the Southern California News Group.
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