In the dog days of the NBA offseason, the Los Angeles Lakers find themselves once again dominating the news cycle as Mark Walter agreed to sell his majority stake in the franchise to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner.
Walter was the majority owner for only one year and there is no definitive reasoning yet behind his decision to sell so quickly. But in his short tenure, Walter has already invested a lot of resources in the Lakers with visions of modeling the franchise after the L.A. Dodgers, who he also owns. Despite Walter selling the team though, a lot of those changes are expected to continue.
“They were in the process of ‘Dodgerizing’ the Lakers,” Ramona Shelburne of ESPN said on The Stephen A. Smith Show. “All of the brains and all of the apparatus that had been installed with the Dodgers to make them the most successful franchise in baseball the last few years was being implemented with the Lakers. … Everyone who’s been hired, everyone who’s been put in place here, they’re still going to keep doing what they’re doing.”
When new faces take over a team, it often is hard to gauge where their minds are in terms of basketball philosophy and running an organization. When Walter officially took over, he waited until this summer to essentially clean house and bring in his own people.
Firings and hirings come with the territory, but the blueprint was in place to improve the Lakers’ front office and remodel to their practice facility. Thankfully, based on Shelburne’s comments, Iger and Kushner will continue with what is already in place, which serves as a building block for them to see the direction Walter was painting.
Obviously, Kushner and Iger will not have the same ideologies as Walter, but hopefully it maintains a belief of turning the Lakers into a franchise that is not lacking in resources, similar to the Dodgers. At the end of the day, if an ownership group is willing to write checks and invest in winning, there should not be many issues.
Bob Iger: It’s ‘premature’ to speculate on plans with Lakers
Despite news breaking of this sale, the NBA will not approve until their Board of Governors meeting later this year. Until then, Iger and Kushner have time to get their ducks in a row.
It will certainly be interesting to see how they want to run the Lakers, but Iger said that it’s premature to speculate on how they will operate as owners. Presumably, significant moves won’t happen until next offseason, when they have time to evaluate all facets of the organization.
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