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After more than 45 years and nearly a dozen NBA championships, the Buss family is selling the Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter, the current owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Sparks.
Family patriarch Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 and immediately experienced the success any team owner dreams of. In 1980, the Lakers, led by league MVP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and rookie Magic Johnson, won the franchise's first title in eight years and its second since moving to Los Angeles from Minneapolis.
Jerry Buss would subsequently oversee nine more championships until 2013, when he died at the age of 80. Following their father's death, six Buss children assumed control of the Lakers, with Jeanie, Jerry's eldest daughter, being enlisted as the team's governor.
Under Jeanie's leadership, the Lakers have not experienced the consistent success that her father did upon taking over the team. Although Los Angeles won a championship in 2020, two years after LeBron James signed with the Lakers, they have missed the playoffs seven times since 2013 and won just a single first-round postseason series since 2020. The team was also temporarily mired in a sibling rivalry and an eventual lawsuit between Jeanie and Jim Buss.
For those reasons, it is easy to see why someone like Bill Simmons, the popular NBA podcaster and noted lifelong Boston Celtics fan, thinks that the Lakers overachieved in spite of their often-criticized owners.
“I feel comfortable saying this: I think they succeeded the last 20 years despite the ownership situation, the Lakers. I really do,” Simmons said on the ‘Bill Simmons Podcast' today. “If LeBron doesn’t decide in the 2017 range, ‘I’m going to go to the Lakers, I want to move all my operations there,' they’re just a mess like any other team. They would’ve had all these weird lottery picks. They would’ve had to try to figure out how — they picked second three years in a row. Then they traded all the rest of their picks for Anthony Davis.
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“I feel like they succeeded despite the ownership situation. Now, granted, they just made one of the best trades in the history of professional sports, so you can’t criticize it too much. But I'm just saying. What the Dodgers have done and what that ownership group has done for that team, if they can figure out how to do something similar in basketball and the same kind of advantages, Zach, I just feel like it's going to be different.”
Since Walter, the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, took over as the Dodgers' owner in 2012, the team has missed the playoffs just once (the first year of the new ownership group), won the NL West 11 times, and has reached the World Series four times, winning twice (2020 and 2024). The Dodgers' winning percentage in the 2010s (.567) and 2020s (.647) also ranks among the top four best decades in franchise history, which dates back to 1883.
Walter reportedly purchased majority ownership of the Lakers for a record-breaking valuation of $10 billion. Jerry Buss initially bought the team for less than $68 million in 1979.
