Brothers Joey and Jesse Buss have been ousted by the Los Angeles Lakers and are not happy about it.
Joey and Jesse were fired as part of a front-office reorganization by the Lakers. The move comes three weeks after the Lakers’ ownership changed hands from the Buss family to Mark Walter, who is also the controlling owner of the Dodgers.
Joey and Jesse were front office executives for the Lakers and had helped in the scouting of some of the teams players over the years. But ever since their father Jerry died, there was fighting among the six Buss siblings, with their sister, Jeanie, taking over as the team’s representative for the Board of Governors.
The Lakers this year sold a majority share of the team to Walter, and the result is Joey and Jesse have now been ousted from the family business. They rubbed in that fact to Jeanie in a statement about their firings.
“We are extremely honored to have been part of this organization for the last 20 seasons,” Joey and Jesse said in a statement. “Thank you to Laker Nation for embracing our family every step of the way. We wish things could be different with the way our time ended with the team. At times like this we wish we could ask our Dad what he would think about it all.”
It’s that last line that stands out — they wonder what their father Jerry would think. Jerry had purchased the Lakers in 1979 and helped them become a standout franchise in the NBA. He had entrusted the team to his six children following his 2013 death, but the siblings began to fight, and ended up selling the team 12 years later. This end result is the opposite of what Jerry wanted. Another brother, Jim Buss, was fired by the team in 2017. Jesse and Joey can now join the club.
