In a wide-ranging interview with USA Today's Sam Amick on the state of the team, Los Angeles Lakers part-owner and executive VP of basketball operations Jim Buss lashed out at critics, the media and the idea that the Lakers are behind his self-imposed timeline of 2017 to be a contending team ... while moving the bar himself. It's an impressive amount of re-imagining of the situation, to be honest, but he's got some points. Let's take a look at the highlights. From USA Today:
“(If) I would have taken credit for all the moves we won championships for, then I would have a resume; I don’t have a resume,” said Buss, who has been on board for five Lakers titles since he first joined and whose bio in the team's media guide is approximately one quarter the size of Kupchak's.
“So my resume is just me all of a sudden taking over, which isn’t true. It’s not true at all. The thing that most people don’t understand is that I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I worked with Jerry West. I’ve done this, and I’ve said these things. But it doesn’t have any teeth, doesn’t have any legs. I was very much part of the final decisions on all of the championships that we’ve won in the last 20 years.
“I was extremely involved on both the basketball and the financial side, but there was no point for me to go out and wave my flag. It didn’t make sense to me. Now I understand that I should have, to a certain degree.”
Buss is a huge fan of West, he reveals in the piece, and maintains a close relationship with the former Laker great (who now helps run the Warriors and has had some of the same problems with Phil Jackson that Buss has had). One of the things that Buss says West told him is to disregard the media because they/we "don't know what they're talking about." What Buss is describing above is a perfect example. If he's right, then no one in media is aware of it because no one has reported that through the years. It was always Buss' father, Jerry (who passed away in 2013), GM Mitch Kupchak and then-coach Phil Jackson. So it's very possible that Buss was intimately involved in that process, and just no one knew about it, or reported it as such.
It doesn't seem likely but stranger things have happened.
Then again, if you read closely, Buss isn't taking responsibility for those moves that brought titles. He's saying he was involved, that he was "part of the final decisions." But what does that mean? At the end of the day, the call goes down to one person. Were these concepts his ideas? If so, why was he never credited with those ideas by anyone? If they weren't, does he get credit for being in the room?
If you wonder why it is that he gets the blame for certain decisions and none of the credit, it's because there were reports that after the 2011 sweep exit at the hands of the Mavericks, Buss was actually "taking over." His father remained involved in all those decisions, but the consensus according to multiple sources was that it was Buss' decision not only to remove Phil Jackson as coach, but to essentially erase all traces of Jackson and start fresh. Mike Brown? Buss' decision. Mike D'Antoni? Buss' decision, and one that his sister Jeanie has railed against. Byron Scott? Buss again.
As I described in this article on the anonymous sources' assault on Buss in an ESPN article, you cannot fail to give Buss credit for the 2012 super team, which self-combusted. He acquired future Hall of Famer Steve Nash and potential future Hall of Famer Dwight Howard. That team should have rolled through the league like a bulldozer. Its failure is not on Buss, or Kupchak, but on injuries, Brown, Howard and Kobe Bryant.
(This is the part where Buss supporters cry "and the Chris Paul trade, too!" For the last time, the NBA owned the team. The GMs had a deal in place. They took it to ownership, which was the league. Ownership declined it. It happens all the time. It looks shady, no doubt. But it's really normal. We really need to move on from this.)
Buss, however, is very big on where the team is at now. Consider this evaluation on the mythical "corner:"
“I think we’ve done a great job (rebuilding). Yeah, I think we’re in dynamite position. Not good position – dynamite. I think we’ve turned the corner. I don’t know if you discount that terminology, ‘turn the corner.’ But when you’re headed down the wrong road, and you can finally get off that road and turn the corner, that’s huge in my opinion.”
Now, I'm on record as saying I like the Lakers' over of 28.5 wins. They added actual NBA players this year, and despite some preseason and summer league shakes, D'Angelo Russell and Julius Randle have the makings of great NBA players in them. There's a reason they were so highly regarded in their draft classes. It wasn't all hype. They're young, and athletic.
This corner, though? The Laker haven't turned it. You can have all the young talent in the world but you have to develop that talent. You have to make it better. The Lakers have question marks in coaching (Byron Scott did well in development in Cleveland but overall is a veteran coach who wants to win games at the expense of improvement), analytics (the team's been promoting the idea that they've had a "secret" analytics department with wide-ranging impact, something which no one in the analytics community seems to have been aware of), and training staff (their injury record over the past three seasons is basically one of the "SAW" sequels. This does not inspire confidence about their ability to transform these young guns into a good team, right off the bat.
And Buss is saying they're going to be good right off the bat.
"You hear what Vegas says, that we’re not supposed to make it (to the playoffs this season). We’ll prove them wrong. If this team plays as a team, with dedication and a purpose, which I think we’ve instilled in them, that there’s a purpose because you guys are a core, you are moving forward together, (playing) together and having each other’s back, I think we’ll surprise a lot of people. I really do.”
Whoa there, Jimmy. You're talking about jumping possibly 30 wins here. You're going to need at least 45 wins (24 more than their total last year) to be in contention, and there's a real possibility that the 8th seed in the West will need 50 games. Even a cursory examination of the Lakers' preseason defense is enough to send you running away from the kind of bold prediction. It's OK for Buss to shoot for the moon, but this is where beleaguered front offices and coaches get in trouble, setting expectations too high. Mitch Kupchak has maintained only that the team will be "better" this year, and that's a good expectation. Buss is setting himself up here by telling fans that they'll be back in the postseason when much of that is beyond their control.
Buss has reason to want to push the envelope, though. Buss told family members a year ago that if he doesn't turn the Lakers around, and back into a "contender" whatever that means, by 2017, he'll step down. Only now, in the USA Today story, he says that doesn't actually mean 2017:
“We’re ahead of (the schedule), so I’m fine with it. I think we’ve turned the corner, exactly like we have (planned). Get a free agent next (summer), and then I think we compete.”
Yet it seems there is some matter of debate about the specifics of the timeline. When pressed on the matter of when the deadline date will be, Jim said, “Two more full seasons, a summer of change and then let that season go. Whatever happens in that third season, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. I think we’re that close.
Two more seasons from now is the start of the 2017-18 seasons. Two more and then that third season ... is 2018. So it's 2018 now? Not according to team president Jeanie Buss.
“He has given me a timeline, and I have no reason to think that they won’t have a competitive team by the deadline,” Jeanie said.
That deadline, she was asked, is the end of the 2016-17 season? “Yes,” she said. “Not this season, but the end of next season, which will be the summer of 2017.”
So ... that's awkward. Not as awkward as Thanksgiving dinner has to be, with Jeanie bringing her fiance who runs another team and was fired by her brother, and then passed over again for the same job. But awkward.
I've written about the myth of the Lakers "exceptionalism" coming to an end (and Tom Ziller covered it in great detail here), but there remains skepticism that it'll take much to revive their ability to make exceptional trades or hires. The real question is where that exceptionalism sprung from. Was it inherent, or was it tied to the team that Buss' father, Dr. Jerry Buss, ran? Did that team cease to exist with the new CBA, or did it disappear with his father's passing if at all. The world seems very different, but the shadow of LA always seems to hang over the league every year.
If Buss wants to hit that timeline, Jeanie's or his, depending on which interpretation of the space-time continuum you want to use I guess, he's going to need to revive that. The Lakers are unlikely to have made enough progress in that time to contend for a title. Be on the cusp? Sure. But with the Lakers, "good" was never good enough.
The demand, the standard, the "corner" is still defined as greatness.
