LOS ANGELES – Say what you will about Jim Buss, but he doesn’t deserve this.
Not to watch every day as his fiercest critic openly campaigns for his job. Not while Jeanie Buss endorses Magic Johnson’s every step by remaining silent. Not while he still has a job to do, even as he must be wondering whether he’s even empowered to do it anymore.
This is death by slow bleed, the sort of torture the Geneva Conventions were meant to eradicate.
Jim Buss has been a flawed executive. He lacks the gravitas that transformed his humble-beginnings father into an icon and has been unable to successfully navigate a modern NBA far more complicated than the one Dr. Jerry Buss made his playground.
Marquee free agents have shunned Buss and the Lakers. The deals he and General Manager Mitch Kupchak have struck over the past half decade were disasters. Steve Nash and Dwight Howard yielded not one playoff victory and continue to cripple the franchise thanks to draft picks owed.
The sum total is that Buss has not been good enough. He deserves to be replaced atop the Lakers at the culmination of a fourth straight losing season. But not like this.
On Tuesday, Johnson appeared on ESPN and not only said he wants to be the Lakers’ President of Basketball Operations, but that if Jim and Jeanie remained dueling figureheads he would not be interested in any other position.
“I’ve got enough things I could be doing,” he said.
Never mind that he has zero experience managing an NBA front office. His only qualifications for such a position are the five championships he won as a player, and those are not transferrable.
He has a ring for every finger, yes, and that includes the middle one he is waving in Jim’s face.
Did Jeanie Buss anticipate this sort of strong-arming when she enlisted Johnson as an adviser to ownership earlier this month?
The rollout has been a public relations nightmare. Jeanie has not shared her vision for the organization’s future with Johnson aboard. If it is for him to eventually replace her brother, Johnson should have kept his mouth shut until Jim either stepped aside or was fired.
If Magic could not do that, then Jeanie should not have announced Johnson was coming on until the deed was done.
What we have instead is a situation that is not only awkward, but heartless.
Nobody knows if this was a shrewd, calculated move to hasten Jim Buss’ removal from power or a rogue power grab.
The onus falls on Jeanie Buss to explain, but she has been conspicuously silent. The window to clarify Johnson’s remarks and establish the roles of her brother, Kupchak and Johnson is closing.
When Jeanie Buss invited Johnson to take a seat at the proverbial table, she should have known he would head right for the big chair. In fact, the best you can say about Jeanie’s role in the fiasco is that she underestimated a man she has known and confided in since 1979.
Her inability to muzzle Johnson amid his current media junket, apparently scheduled before he signed on with the Lakers, is beyond problematic.
If he won’t toe the line now, what happens when he actually takes on power?
By empowering Johnson, Jeanie Buss no longer controls the organization’s message.
As the Lakers have descended into the darkest depths of the franchise’s history, she has been largely immune from criticism. This situation, far more chaotic than it ever needed to be, is strike one.
She is drawing question marks that previously were not there.
The carnage might be short-lived. If Johnson oversees a 17th championship banner being lifted into the rafters at Staples Center, few will remember or care how he came to replace old … what was his name?
“From here on out,” Johnson told the hosts of ESPN’s “First Take,” “it has to be one message, one team, one voice. Because if it doesn’t come to that, the losing continues.”
Johnson is revered and players respect him. His voice will carry weight in free agent pitches; far more than Jim’s ever did. He will win every press conference he holds.
Jim Buss will be gone. That, however, is no longer the comfort everyone believed it to be.
It is now clear that those who remain are just as capable of making a mess of things as he ever was.
Contact the writer: boram@scng.com
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