The Los Angeles Lakers organization is undergoing some significant changes as Jeanie and the Buss family sold their controlling ownership stake of the team to Mark Walter, who also owns the L.A. Dodgers.
Jeanie has been running the team since the death of his father, Dr. Jerry Buss, and there is an agreement in place for that to continue as she will remain governor for at least the next five years.
Her younger siblings, Joey and Jesse Buss, however, were recently fired from their front office roles with the Lakers.
Needless to say, there is tension among the Buss family and within the Lakers organization as all of this takes place. And it appears that tension also includes superstar LeBron James.
In a recent report from Baxter Holmes of ESPN detailing the inner workings of the Lakers and Buss family through the recent sale, he detailed Jeanie’s feelings towards James over the last few years and even revealed that she tried to trade the superstar to the L.A. Clippers:
And team sources told ESPN she even began to turn against the Lakers’ star player, LeBron James.
Jeanie privately grumbled, people close to the team say, about what she felt was James’ outsized ego and the overt control that he and Klutch Sports, which represents both James and Anthony Davis, exerted over the organization at times.
She didn’t like that James was considered a savior for a floundering franchise when he arrived in 2018 and that it was he who chose the Lakers rather than the team’s leadership receiving praise for landing him. Team sources have been adamant for years that James’ camp informed the Lakers as early as 2017 that he was coming to join them when he became a free agent the following year.
The distance between Jeanie and James widened after the Lakers traded for Russell Westbrook in July 2021, people close to the team said. The team had made the trade in an effort to appease James, but the acquisition backfired in catastrophic fashion. L.A. went 33-49 and missed the playoffs, and James seemed to wash his hands of his role in the acquisition.
Jeanie privately bristled about what she felt was his lack of accountability and the way James would shift blame onto others after the Westbrook trade, the people said.
In 2022, in the aftermath of the Westbrook trade, multiple people said Jeanie privately mused about not giving James a contract extension and, later that year, even about trading James, with the LA Clippers floated as a possibility. (This was before James received a no-trade clause in July 2024 after signing a new two-year, $104 million contract.)
And when the Lakers drafted James’ son Bronny with the 55th pick in the 2024 draft, Jeanie privately remarked that James should be grateful for such a gesture, but she felt that he wasn’t, people close to the team told ESPN.
That summer, as she discussed a new contract for James, Jeanie seemed more resigned to the fact that they’d have to do it — almost begrudgingly accepting that they’d take a massive PR hit by not doing so.
From the outside looking in, Jeanie and LeBron always appeared to be on the same page, especially after winning a championship in 2020.
James’ relationship with the Lakers organization as whole, however, has been rocky going back to the summer when they didn’t offer him a contract extension and he chose to pick up his player option to play the 2025-26 season on an expiring contract.
While it’s unclear if this tension with Jeanie played a role in all that, this season could very well be James’ last with the Lakers as he will hit free agency this summer.
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