Lakers sale takes team off last Buss
LOS ANGELES—The Buss family’s decision to sell a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Lakers at an eye-popping franchise valuation of $10 billion marks the end of nearly a half-century when one of the most valuable properties in the sports world was run by an eccentric father and his sometimes squabbling children.
With high-living playboy Jerry Buss and current team governor Jeanie Buss in charge, the glamorous Lakers essentially have been the professional sports equivalent of a quirky family business for two generations.
Sports became increasingly corporate and monolithic in the 21st century while franchise values skyrocketed and ever-more-wealthy titans seized control of this perpetual growth industry.
Just not around Hollywood’s favorite basketball team, with its gold uniforms and 17 golden trophies.
“The majority of businesses in this country are family-owned businesses,” Jeanie Buss told NPR earlier this year in a rare interview to promote a Netflix comedy series based on her career. “And everybody has a family. If you’re in business with them, [disagreements] happen. But at the end of the day, what brings you together is the team or the business, and you want to build something successful.”
The Lakers and the Buss clan have been inextricable since 1979—the longest active ownership tenure in the NBA—but Mark Walter’s stunning sports coup Wednesday effectively ends this improbable era. A person with knowledge of the agreement confirmed it to The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because neither side immediately announced the deal.
The sale should make an extraordinarily wealthy woman of Jeanie Buss, one of Jerry’s seven acknowledged children and a longtime employee of his various sporting concerns.
And that’s the biggest reason many Lakers fans are rejoicing: This lavish sale comes with the knowledge that the buyers have exponentially more resources than the Buss family—and Walter has showed he knows how to spend it intelligently.
Walter, who heads a group that already bought 27 percent of the Lakers in 2021, has a sterling reputation in Southern California for his group’s stewardship of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The iconic baseball team has become a perpetual World Series contender with bold, aggressive financial moves grounded in smart organizational planning ever since Walter’s firm, Guggenheim Partners, paid $2 billion to wrest the Dodgers from the reviled Frank McCourt in 2012.
