There’s what’s good for Mark Walter, the loans and the credit he used to conquer Los Angeles’ pro sports empire coming due as quickly as the boundaries were built. For him, a quickie sale of the Los Angeles Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for a record valuation of $12.5 billion made a bunch of sense.
There’s what’s good for the Buss siblings not in the team facility, a chance to fully wash clean of the family business that’s caused fractures and frustrations, while cashing out for the second time in a little more than a year. For them, the roles with the organization that defined their family name essentially ended a year ago when Walter bought the team, either formally or informally. It’s why they voted as a block to put their shares up for sale, something they informed Walter, Iger and Kushner of on Monday.
There’s what’s good for Jeanie Buss, the governor who took control of the organization after the death of her and her siblings’ father and steered them through family drama, unthinkable organizational tragedies from the death of Kobe Bryant to the Palisades fires, and one championship. She led the Lakers into that $10 billion sale to Walter, securing at least five years of governorship. And now, according to her attorney, she believes the family trust doesn’t have majority voting authority to trigger a sale. So she’s going to fight. Because that’s what makes the most sense for her.
For the Lakers, there are ripples.
Everything we know about the Lakers being sold again
Dan Woike
What about the players who are boarding flights to Slovenia to invest in their locker room for the upcoming season, to build chemistry and push the Lakers back to championship glory? What about the employees in the building, the ones who could only sort of shrug their shoulders as they’ve seen two sales since June 2025? What about the ones who held their breath as the new ownership group underwent two separate runs of layoffs and saw their friends ushered by security into a holding room near the front door while they waited to be fired? What about front office bosses who have hired people while on their way out? What about those who built a roster in the image of one group but now wait for another one? What about a fan base sold a vision that the success of the Los Angeles Dodgers would soon be theirs?
What about the Lakers?
Inside the team facility, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the uncertainty around everyone’s job security, it was, weirdly enough, business as usual Monday.
According to a pair of league sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss the Lakers’ internal operations, there is a belief around the NBA that the team cannot complete the buildout of its basketball operations department until the ownership situation is resolved. After laying out a vision for a pair of assistant general managers, with one focused on analytics and one focused on player scouting, the team has yet to make any inroads in pro scouting. With preseason games set to start in a little more than a month, filling a staff and getting everyone accustomed to a system was already going to be difficult. Now it feels like a distant hope more than a reality.
Franchise sales always result in a bit of a holding pattern, as the old group still technically operates things while the new group moves toward closing. In typical situations, a longer bid process means teams that buy in have a pretty good plan in place and can start putting things into motion. That’s not the case when a deal like this comes together over a weekend and there aren’t any real plans in place.
“It’s just premature to speculate at all about what we plan to do, because frankly, we haven’t made any plans yet,” Iger told the California Post last week.
That’s probably for the best. An already fluid situation got more fluid Monday, as any hope of a smooth transition disappeared with that letter from Jeanie Buss’ attorney. This kind of change was probably never going to be smooth.
And now, everyone else involved will deal with the bumps.
— Sam Amick contributed to this report.
