A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. — George Moore
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My first thought was to hit the road. Once I got my body back in shape, I figured I’d get a dog and head across the country in a van, a la John Steinbeck. It was the perfect time to explore all the hidden corners of America I’d never seen.
I’ve been a rambling man at heart ever since my high school days, when my teammates and I would drive for miles across the plains en route to our next game. I love the freedom of the open road. I love the fact that you can never be entirely sure what awaits you over the next rise. As Steinbeck put it, “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
For me, the highway is a form of meditation. Throughout my life, I’ve turned to the open road whenever my life was in flux. Driving long distance makes me feel more engaged in the moment and transports me into a calmer, more contemplative state of mind. When I was experimenting with meditation in my twenties, I was inspired by the musings of another famous road warrior, Robert Pirsig. “You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense,” he wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”
This time, however, my body wasn’t cooperating. First, right after the 2011 playoffs, I had to undergo prostate surgery, which laid me up for most of the summer. Then I had to lose weight and get myself in condition for a difficult knee replacement operation. The surgery went well, but the recovery was brutal. To make matters worse, I injured my Achilles tendon during the following summer in Montana and was still limping around after months of sporadic workouts. Disheartened, I put my travel plans on hold and returned to L.A. in the fall determined to make healing my number one job.
In late September 2012, Mitch Kupchak, the Lakers’ general manager, invited me to lunch to see how I was doing. He asked me if I was planning to get back to coaching any time soon, and I said I had no intention of doing that, especially if it meant moving to another city. At that point, I was interested in exploring sedentary front office positions, and I had a few possibilities in the works.
So I was surprised in early November when my fiancée, Jeanie, came home after meeting with her brother Jimmy, the Lakers’ head of basketball operations, and asked me to “please just hear him out” about returning to coach the team. Over the summer Jimmy and Mitch had made deals with two major stars — point guard Steve Nash and center Dwight Howard — creating a “dream team” that prognosticators predicted had a good shot of winning the championship. But Mike Brown, who had taken over as coach the year before, had trouble getting the players to gel together at the start of the 2012-13 season and Jimmy decided they needed to replace him after the team went 0-8 in the preseason and dropped four of the first five regular games.
The meeting took place at my house on Saturday morning. Jimmy brought Mitch along and we talked mostly about whether I was up for doing the job. By then, I’d recovered from my Achilles tendon problem and I told them that I felt capable of handling the travel grind. To be honest, though, I was still ambivalent about returning to coaching. Now that I had begun to recover from my surgeries, I finally felt strong enough to start enjoying my retirement and I wasn’t keen on becoming a slave to the NBA schedule again.
Still, the idea of going after one more ring with Kobe, Pau, and my other former players intrigued me. My biggest concern was whether this team could beat the reigning champs, the Miami Heat. In my mind, there’s nothing worse than making it all the way to the Finals and losing. As they were leaving, I told Jimmy and Mitch that I needed time to think it over, but I’d be ready to give them an answer on Monday.
Most fans know what happened next. Mitch called me around midnight on Sunday and told me they had decided to hire another coach, Mike D’Antoni. I was a little stunned at first, but, on reflection, I realized why things fell apart so quickly. I was thinking of the job as a one-season gig, but Jimmy and Mitch were looking for a coach who could help them rebuild the team over the long haul. They were also eager to turn the Lakers back into the sort of fast-paced, high-scoring team they were in the Magic Johnson “Showtime” era — and D’Antoni was certainly a coach who could make that happen.
The overriding issue, however, was the state of owner Jerry Buss’s health. He’d been in and out of the hospital during the previous several months battling prostate cancer and other ailments. But things had taken a turn for the worse recently, and his family hoped that a turn in the Lakers’ fortunes might bring some joy into his life and, with luck, help speed his recovery.
Several weeks later, the story came out that Dr. Buss, not Jimmy, had made the decision to go with D’Antoni. This seemed unlikely to me given the state of Jerry’s health — not to mention, Jimmy’s long history of impetuous decision-making — but it was impossible to verify that story one way or the other. In the end, it didn’t matter that much anyway. I was ready to move on.
After I got Mitch’s phone call, I realized that I had to distance myself from the Lakers, and I began talking to several other teams about jobs, including the Brooklyn Nets, Toronto Raptors, and Phoenix Suns. And as a favor to Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores, I advised the team’s general manager, Joe Dumars, on his search for a new coach.
The prospect that captured my imagination didn’t involve any coaching. In December 2011 my son Charley introduced me to Chris Hansen, a successful hedge fund manager who had put together a group of investors who were trying to bring an NBA team back to Seattle. Hansen’s plan was to buy a majority share of the struggling Sacramento Kings franchise, then persuade the NBA to let him move it to the former home of the Sonics.
What I liked about Chris was his innovative thinking about sports and community. He wanted me to help him create a new kind of sports culture, focusing on the team itself rather than individual superstars. His goal was to make the fans feel as if they, too, were part of the family. One of Chris’s ideas, inspired by the Seattle Sounders soccer team, was to hold large pep rallies before each game to get the fans juiced up as they made their way to the arena. Another idea was to create a low-priced standing room section behind the baskets, complete with beat boards to rev up the noise level. Chris even wanted to remove the players’ names from their jerseys to shift attention away from individual players. I told him the marketing department of the NBA might have a problem with that one.
My loosely defined job was to be keeper of the flame, overseeing the hiring of key staff and setting the tone for how everyone worked together. I wouldn’t be the hands-on general manager — recruiting players, orchestrating trades, and negotiating deals. Instead, I’d focus on the big picture, making sure that all the pieces fit together and contributed to creating a positive, integrated culture. This was something I’d done on a small scale with the Lakers, but in Seattle we were talking about applying those principles not just to the players, but to the organization as a whole.
One reason this idea interested me was that it seemed like an antidote to the transformation that was occurring in the NBA due to the league’s most recent collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union. That agreement, which was designed to create more parity in the league, put strict limits on how much teams could spend on talent — levying escalating fines on those that exceeded the designated salary cap and rewarding those that kept their payrolls below the line. The idea was to give the small-market teams, some of which are losing money, a greater chance to compete against well-heeled teams such as the Lakers.
In response, most teams have already begun to change the way they recruit talent. The Oklahoma City Thunder, for example, unloaded star guard James Harden to Houston because, under the new agreement, the team wouldn’t be able to afford him, given what it was already committed to paying their other stars, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. Similarly, the Lakers retooled their roster so that they would have only three players under contract at the end of 2013-2014, and would be able to make a serious bid for players in the upcoming free-agent market.
Sadly, what inevitably is getting lost in this shift is a sense of continuity over time. Not only will the new agreement make it virtually impossible for teams — no matter how fat their wallets — to assemble lineups with more than two or three bona fide stars, it will also significantly reduce the number of players who can play the bulk of their careers on the same team. When I was with the Knicks, most of the key players on our championship teams — including Bill Bradley, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, and Dave DeBusschere — were together for six years or more. That may never happen again. Instead we’re going to see a lot of teams made up of one or two stars and a cast of interchangeable specialty players on short-term contracts. As a result, it will be even more difficult to build the kind of group consciousness necessary to excel. The only remedy is to create a culture that empowers the players and gives them a strong foundation to build upon. Otherwise they’ll be too insecure to focus their energy on bonding together as a team.
As fate would have it, Hansen and his partners weren’t able to close the deal. Things looked promising in January 2013 when they arranged to buy a controlling interest in the Kings from the majority owners, the Maloof family. But Sacramento’s mayor (and former NBA All-Star) Kevin Johnson secured an agreement from the league that gave investors committed to keeping the team in place an opportunity to make a competing bid. Johnson also persuaded the city council to approve a financing plan to raise $447 million for a new arena downtown (including a $258 million public subsidy). In May the NBA’s board of governors voted to prevent Hansen and his partners from moving the franchise, and later that month the Maloofs accepted an offer from a local group led by software mogul Vivek Ranadive. That put an end to the dream.
Before the curtain came down on the Seattle deal, Jeanie and I had to grapple with a more serious personal loss. In late 2012, Dr. Buss gave Jeanie a list of people he wanted to see before he died, including Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Jerry West, and many others. In October, Jeanie had hoped that her dad would get well enough to come to a game at the Staples Center. By December, his ordeal had turned into a long vigil.
During that period, I decided to propose to Jeanie. Marriage was something we’d talked about before, but had always found reasons to postpone. The thought came to me during Thanksgiving at my daughter Brooke’s house in Santa Barbara. All my children and their families were gathered together, except for my oldest daughter Elizabeth and her tribe, who live in Virginia. It felt good being there with Jeanie and seeing how comfortable she was with everyone, and I began thinking that the time had come to pop the question. In the back of my mind, I also thought that our engagement might give Dr. Buss some peace of mind in his final days.
Dr. Buss, who loved to lavish women with precious stones, often teased Jeanie about my sub-par performance in the jewelry department. So when we returned home, I decided to make up for lost time and buy an engagement ring that expressed my love for Jeanie. She was thrilled when I presented it to her on Christmas morning and she showed it off to her father at the hospital later that day.
In February I went to the hospital to say good-bye to Dr. Buss. Even though he was barely conscious that day, I thought it was important to reassure him that he didn’t have to worry about Jeanie. “We’re all going to be fine, Jerry,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “You’ve made a good plan for your family’s future. It’s okay to let go.”
A few days later he passed away.
It wasn’t until Dr. Buss died that I realized that how many people were dependent upon him. The list included not just his six children, but also his former partners, his devoted personal staff and the whole Lakers organization. Jerry was a warm-hearted, larger-than-life guy who’d had a hardscrabble childhood growing up in Wyoming. He never forgot how much the kindness of others had allowed him to climb his way out of poverty and achieve success.
One of the most impressive things about Dr. Buss was the caring relationship that he developed with his players. Magic, who referred to himself as Jerry’s “adopted son,” spoke movingly at the memorial ceremony about the extraordinary support Dr. Buss gave him when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1991 — crying when he heard the news, finding him the best doctors, and making sure he took his meds every day. Jerry also formed a strong bond with Kobe. When Kobe was demanding to be traded in 2007, we had a meeting with him and his agent during which Dr. Buss said, “Kobe, if I had a diamond of great value, four or five karats, would I give up that diamond for four diamonds of one karat? No. There’s no equal value that we can get for you. A trade would not match what you bring to this team.” Eventually Jerry won Kobe over and he agreed to stay.
Dr. Buss left detailed instructions about how he wanted his children to run the Lakers after he was gone. He designated Jeanie to be in charge of business operations, Jimmy to oversee basketball personnel, and their older brother, Johnny, to have a high-level advisory role. After the funeral, however, Jimmy and Johnny were surprised to learn that Dr. Buss had named Jeanie as the Lakers’ voting member on the NBA’s board of governors. That decision essentially gave Jeanie final responsibility for the Lakers franchise.
The tension escalated later that year when an excerpt from an updated edition of Jeanie’s book, Laker Girl, appeared in the Los Angeles Times revealing how blindsided she felt by the way I was treated during the coaching search. That led to a number of emotional but constructive conversations between Jimmy and Jeanie in which they hammered out a more effective way of communicating with each other. If nothing else, those conversations gave them both more clarity about their respective roles.
Of course, it didn’t help matters that the Lakers had struggled all season to make the playoffs. Not only was Steve Nash out for the first part of the season with a fractured left leg, but Dwight Howard, who was coming back from major back surgery, also got off to a worrisome start. What’s more, Pau Gasol was having trouble fitting into the new, faster offense. At the All-Star break, the Lakers were three and a half games behind the Rockets for the Western Conference’s final playoff spot. After the break, driven by Kobe’s leadership, they went on an 8-2 drive and finally scrambled over the .500 mark. Then, five days before the end of the regular season, Kobe tore his Achilles tendon in a game against Golden State, and the Lakers barely managed to eke out a place in the playoffs by beating Houston in overtime of the final game. Without Kobe, however, they weren’t able to do much against the San Antonio Spurs in the first round and got swept in four straight.
In the midst of all this, friends asked if I had any feelings of schadenfreude and I said definitely no. The Lakers were family. More than anything, I wanted the team to succeed.
After the playoffs, Mitch Kupchak came over to my house to discuss the team’s strategy for luring Dwight Howard, or D12, as he had come to be known, to stay with the Lakers. The competition was stiff. It included the Atlanta Hawks (his hometown team), Golden State Warriors (a young team loaded with talent), Dallas Mavericks (a former champion led by Dirk Nowitzki), and Houston Rockets (a strong championship contender). As Dwight’s current employer, the Lakers had an advantage of being able to offer him a package totaling $30 million more than the other teams’, plus an additional year on his contract, but that didn’t guarantee anything.
During his postseason interview, Dwight asked for assurance that I would be coming back to coach the team, but Mitch quickly disabused him of that notion. He asked me to back him up on that and not send out a conflicting message. I agreed and told Mitch that I would reach out to Dwight and encourage him to sign with the Lakers. He never answered any of my messages.
Critics poked fun at the Lakers’ D12 campaign, which included putting up billboards all over town with a giant photo of Dwight in Lakers purple and gold and a one-word headline: STAY. But some of the other teams were no less hokey. Dallas owner Mark Cuban created an animated feature starring D12 for his presentation, and the Rockets’ GM put together a video of several local children, including his own daughter, pleading with Dwight to move to Houston.
The Lakers invited Kobe and Steve to the final pitch meeting to help persuade Dwight to come on board. It sounded like a good idea. Steve sent out an amusing tweet before the meeting: “Dwight Howard we’re coming for you. You’re going to love the statue we build for you outside Staples in 20yrs!” And Kobe made a moving speech during the pitch, promising to teach Dwight the secret of winning championships that he’d learned from the best in the game.
If the meeting had ended there, it might have worked. But after the presentation, Dwight asked Kobe what he was planning to do after he recovered from his Achilles injury. Was this going to be his last year? “No,” replied Kobe. “I’m planning to be around for three or four more years.”
At that point, according to others in the room, Dwight’s eyes went blank and he drifted away. In his mind, the game was over.
A few days later he announced that he was signing with the Rockets.
Jeanie wasn’t happy when she heard the news. She was convinced that the result would have been different if her father had still been alive and healthy enough to be involved in the negotiations. In all his years with the Lakers, Dr. Buss had lost only one prime player to free agency: A.C. Green to Phoenix in 1993. If Jerry were in charge, she said, he would have formed a supportive relationship with Dwight and been able to steer the talks in the right direction.
That may be true, but I’m not sure this turn of events was an unmitigated disaster. In fact, I thought it would not only be a good wake-up call for Jimmy and Mitch, but it would also give them more flexibility budget-wise to create the young, speedier team they’d always wanted. In the short term, however, the team’s performance was less than inspiring. After a season racked with injuries to Kobe, Pau, Steve Nash, and others, the Lakers failed to make the playoffs for the first time since 2005. Not surprisingly, Mike D’Antoni announced shortly afterward that he was resigning as head coach.
