BOSTON – Put yourself in Jeanie Buss’ shoes.
Seven months have passed since your Lakers landed the great LeBron James, yet the path back to the playoffs is still devastatingly dark. After all the early in-fighting, the midseason injuries and the inept play that has plagued them these past few weeks, the prospect of this storied franchise missing the postseason for a sixth consecutive time is more real than ever.
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The weight of a celebrated history is upon them all.
From 1948 to 2013, through those Minneapolis years and Los Angeles era that spans nearly six decades, the Lakers missed the playoffs a grand total of… five times. Now with 19 games to go in the present day, the 10th-place Lakers (30-33) are four back in the loss column of the Clippers and San Antonio with a three-game homestand coming up next against the Clippers (Monday), Denver (Wednesday) and Boston (Saturday).
So yeah, one might understand why Buss was a little fiery in her Sloan Conference appearances in Boston on Saturday.
Yet when she told two separate crowded rooms that reports about her team’s superstar dealings weren’t accurate, and even employed the insulting “fake news” moniker that should henceforth be stricken from the autocratic record, it was as clear a sign as any that these are not happy times in Laker Land.
“The biggest challenge…(is) the fake news about how we were supposedly trading our entire roster for a certain player, which is completely not true,” Buss, who was appearing on panel with Boston Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck to discuss the Lakers-Celtics rivalry, said while avoiding saying the name of said superstar, New Orleans’ Anthony Davis. “Those stories leak out, and it hurt our young players. It wasn’t fair. (Lakers president of basketball operations) Magic (Johnson) got in front of that, and I think we’re back on the right track. Hopefully that will allow us to make a playoff push coming up here.”
And that was before the Lakers would fall to the bottom-of-the-barrel Phoenix Suns later that day.
When it comes to the Lakers and the long list of things that have led to their demise, the media doesn’t even crack the top 10. Ask anyone around the league about the way Johnson and general manager Rob Pelinka built the roster post-LeBron last summer, and there’s utter confusion about why you wouldn’t make shooting a greater priority. There’s a ripple effect from there that made this an unpleasant experience for all involved, with no better proof than the Lakers’ league-worst shooting percentage from the free-throw line (69 percent). It only gets worse from there.
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But the frustration on Jeanie’s front, quite clearly, was born out of the perceived disconnect between what was reported and what they claim actually happened in those pre-Feb. 7 trade deadline talks between Johnson and subsequently-fired Pelicans general manager Dell Demps. But the he-said-she-said game is impossible to unpack in public – politics and league rules keep people from speaking plainly, you know – and so this became a public relations situation that was inherently difficult.
Yet, according to a source with knowledge of the situation, the real root of the comments was much more nuanced than it might have appeared. From Jeanie on down, there is a growing belief that rival teams like New Orleans have gone to great lengths to do the kind of subversive damage that is nearly impossible to prove. Johnson himself has said that he doesn’t believe the Pelicans negotiated in good faith, and it certainly was unique to see trade packages with remarkable specificity being reported throughout the process.
On this front and so many others, the walls were talking again.
But even beyond the Davis story, there’s a trend here when it comes to media reports creating internal issues among the most important Lakers power brokers. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that much.
Just as players in this league often find themselves trying to discern fact from fiction within the locker room, with media rumblings always capable of creating the kinds of divides that Boston’s Kyrie Irving discussed with reporters recently, so too do owners and executives.
“I’d rather see more responsibility with the media, and just maybe taking it back a little bit,” Jeanie had understandably said.
Yet conversely, it has become far too trendy for some of the NBA’s most high profile people to kill the (media) messenger with broad generalizations and accusations rather than specifying the exact nature of the latest complaint. And lest we forget, the lack of desirable results is almost always the driving force here.
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None of this would be happening if the Lakers had simply found a way to put it together in these past weeks. Instead, with James having returned on Jan. 31 from the groin injury that cost him 17 games, they have gone 5-7 since (LeBron missed one of the losses in that 13-game stretch due to rest). And now comes the part that will prove more painful than all the rest if it comes to pass: The price that comes with missing the playoffs again.
There are the obvious basketball costs: Young players missing out on valuable postseason experience; LeBron having to face an entire summer worth of scrutiny for the part he played in it all; Lakers coach Luke Walton and his staff possibly being fired with one year left on his deal as a result of the playoff absence. But there is a counterintuitive business factor here, too.
The first-round, believe it or not, is a bigger money-maker than the subsequent three possible rounds – including the Finals. Why? Because it’s the only round in which teams still hold their local television and radio rights before yielding to the national networks. And when you’re a team like the Lakers, who signed a 20-year, $4 billion deal with Time Warner (now Spectrum SportsNet) in 2011 that is the league’s largest, there is no shortage of incentive on all fronts to somehow get out of this playoff race alive.
No matter how tall of a task that first-round matchup might be, getting in beats the divisive alternative.
(Top Photo: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)