Luke Walton expected Jim Buss, Mitch Kupchak to remain in their roles

Luke Walton has been the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers for less than a full year, and already the team’s front office looks much different than he envisioned it looking when he agreed to take the job.

In an interview with Sam Amick of USA Today, Walton essentially admitted that he was blindsided when the Lakers brought in Magic Johnson, fired Mitch Kupchak as general manager and removed Jim Buss from day-to-day basketball operations.

“I was driving to breakfast (when he heard that they had been fired),” Walton recalled. “And yeah, I was surprised. We had a meeting scheduled with all four of us (Walton, Jim, Kupchak and Johnson), and I was going to breakfast before the morning and then my phone started blowing up, so I came in.

“Honestly, it wasn’t ever clear to me (that Jim and Kupchak would be on their way out) because when I interviewed that was one of the questions I asked, was ‘Are we going to be in this together?’ And they said ‘Yeah,’ so I was under the assumption that (it was) Jimmy and Mitch. So I wasn’t worried about this or that. I was expecting that that was the front office, the whole time I was going to be here, at least for a while, so there wasn’t any uncertainty with me.”

Kupchak and Jim Buss likely played a big role in the decision to hire Walton, so you can understand why his relationship with them might be much different from Johnson’s. In reality, Walton was probably more surprised about the Johnson hire than he was with Kupchak and Buss being replaced. Given the way Magic trashed Buss on Twitter for years, you knew he wouldn’t join the Lakers if Buss was going to be calling the shots.