OT: Magic to run the Lakers. Kupchak, Jim Buss out.... NOW

As you can imagine, I have a LOT of things I think I think about this.

 

Point the first - MGrowOld is 100% spot-on about how consultants roll, though anyone who's watched Office Space won't be surprised by this.  My current firm was much smaller 6 years ago and "business consultants" would walk in the door unannounced all the time to do a cold pitch to my boss on how he could grow the firm.  My boss may drink too much coffee and may have the attention span of a headless lemur but he's the fundamentally most savvy, decent & fair guy I've ever worked for so he noped the fuck outta those asswipe charlatans with a quickness.

 

Point the second - did Jim Buss/Mitch Kupchak deserve to get fired?  A lot things happened to put the Lakers in their current dire straits.  Many of them were out of the front office's control - most notably the 'basketball reasons' CP3 trade, which is why David Stern and Cavs* owner Dan Gilbert (* - sorry, MGrow and other Cavs fans) can rot in the same trailer-trash circle of hell alongside the Boren family.  There were many other missteps - Deng and Mosgovs' contracts, hiring Mike Brown - that can only be laid at the feet of the front office.  On the other hand, Mitch and Jim Buss did some good things that deserve recognition - Kupchak engineering the Gasol trade gave us two titles and although he's a sad punchline now, Buss picking Andrew Bynum also played a role there.  And we unloaded dross for dross when we traded him for D12 so that's a wash.  However the record is mixed and the team is years away from contending.  I would argue that the aborted CP3 trade was the single biggest culprit and David Stern bears the lion's share of the responsibility in throwing the Lakers under the bus(s)  However, our front office did not make enough right moves to get out from under the bus.  David Stern cannot be fired from the Laker organization, however Buss-chak could, and were.  C'est la vie.

 

Point the third - is Magic the right guy for the job?  Here's why he is:  If you were going to craft a resume for running a team that didn't include 'running a team' his is as good as anyone else's.  His business mentor was Dr. Jerry Buss who is arguably the greatest team owner in history and his own track record as a business CEO is excellent.  He's at least in the top 10 percentile of business savvy people in the country and as far as basketball IQ he is in the top 10 of people who ever lived.  I'm not going to hold his disastrous stints as talk show host or Laker coach against him, because a) those are not what he's doing now and b) it's OK to fail and most successful business people would tell you it's essential to do so.  And his stint with the Dodgers was encouraging, they did pretty well with him as part of the braintrust. To the extent that you need to build relationships to lure in top talent, Magic should be terrific.  Everybody - even Celtic fans - likes Magic.  So he has the tools and the smarts to maybe to a good job and he's been saying the right things, except when he hasn't.  Which brings us to....

 

Point the third-and-half - Here's why he isn't:  My main concern is that the story has, and continues to be, Magic as a player in the ongoing Buss vs Buss drama.  If you look at the best team owners - Micky Arison of the Heat, Dr Jerry Buss, Peter Holt of the Spurs, Mike Ilitch (RIP), the Rooney family, etc - they tended to be very good at getting out of the way and not being the story.  Magic isn't like that - he has an ego.  Granted, he *should* have an ego but his outsized personality is, to me, not conducive to having a drama-free tenure as team-runner.

 

Moreover, the ongoing perception that Jim & Jeanie Buss aren't on the same page is a problem 100% of their making and they're both at fault here (Jim Buss can be forgiven for not wanting his sister's ex-fiance around - I love the guy for the five titles but Phil Jackson is caustic, passive-aggressive asshole) and Magic's didn't help by throwing gasoline on that tire fire with his very blunt Twitter shots at Jim Buss.  The optics, as they say, were bad.

 

Point the fourth:  Where do we go from here?  Crossing our fingers once again.   I'm very leery of change for its own sake.  The first thing male lions do when they take over a pride is kill all the cubs so they can sire their own cubs on the females.  So it is an ingrained tendency to clean house but all things in moderation.  In fact the most alarming thing Jim Buss did when he took over the franchise from his father was to fire all the long-time Laker employees like Ronnie Lester, their head scout, and a whole slew of other people.  Again this will sound quite familiar to other MGoReaders.  Still, it is what it is.  And the biggest problem the team had that no one talked about was the cloud of uncertainly as to which Buss child was calling the shots.  It wasn't solved to anyone's satisfaction but the hope here is that the coup, while bloody, is finally over and we can move on.