The Los Angeles Lakers are committed to building out their entire front office staff now that Mark Walter has taken over as owner. It is well known that the Lakers are pretty bare bones when it comes to different departments in the organization, including scouting and medical, amongst other things.
But that won’t be the case for long as the organization has already been hard at work in looking at potential hires in the front office. In fact, according to Yaron Weitzman of Yahoo Sports, the team actually offered the role of executive vice president of basketball operations to Minnesota Timberwolves assistant general manager Steve Senior, but he declined the role to remain in Minnesota:
Around February, Zaidi started placing calls to agents representing front office and medical personnel to inquire about their clients. Around three months later, the Lakers offered Steve Senior, an assistant general manager for the Minnesota Timberwolves, the job of executive vice president of basketball operations. Senior, who declined to comment, decided to remain with the Timberwolves, according to multiple league sources.
It would be interesting to know exactly why Senior chose to remain with the Timberwolves as joining the Lakers as executive VP would be a promotion from his current position, and surely would have come with a nice pay raise as well.
Nonetheless, it is good to see the Lakers have been doing their due diligence for months now in trying to identify the right pieces to add to this front office. Rob Pelinka is the president of basketball operations, along with being general manager, so this role would likely be the second in command and work very closely alongside Pelinka in helping to build this roster.
It is interesting to note that Farhan Zaidi was the one making the calls to different personnel as he is in more of an advisory role to Walter and doesn’t necessarily have an official role with the Lakers outside of consulting with Pelinka over the past few months. But he is obviously someone who is very trusted by the Lakers’ brass and his voice will matter as the franchise continues their search to bring in the right people for this organization.
Farhan Zaidi & Andrew Friedman sitting in on Lakers’ assistant GM interviews
Two of the biggest hires the Lakers plan to make this summer is that of a pair of assistant general managers to work under Pelinka and Zaidi and Andrew Friedman have both been sitting in on interviews in that search as well.
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