Winners and losers of Lakers sale: Good news for Luka Dončić and other NBA owners, Celtics lose record

One of the most famous families in basketball is about to exit stage left. After 46 years and 11 championships, the Buss family is selling its majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers to Dodgers owner Mark Walter at a $10 billion valuation. It is one of the most stunning sales in the history of sports not only for the gargantuan price, but for the people behind it.

The Buss family has never been absentee owners. Dr. Jerry Buss was so essential to running the Lakers that HBO literally made a TV show about him. Several of his children have held significant roles not just in the business, but in basketball operations, and Jeanie Buss has been the team’s governor since her father died in 2013. Everything that has happened to the Lakers for nearly the past half-century has revolved around this family in some meaningful way.

Jeanie Buss will reportedly retain her governorship of the team, but we do not yet know what exactly that will entail. It’s hard to believe Walter would spend $10 billion on a team he isn’t going to control. This sale is going to change quite a bit in Los Angeles, so let’s talk about who stands to benefit and who loses out in the biggest franchise sale in NBA history.

Winner: Luka Dončić

We like to apply credit and blame for a team’s success or failures to superstars, but more often than not, those stars are at the mercy of their front offices. Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant won the Buss family 10 championships, but most of their teams were built by Jerry West, the greatest general manager in NBA history. The 11th and final Buss championship came from LeBron James. Sure enough, he wasn’t drafted by a team that had a West-esque executive at the helm, so he had to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to get to one. He started winning championships when he linked up with Pat Riley in Miami.

Think about the front office Dončić is coming from in Dallas. Forget for a moment that it was dumb enough to trade him in the first place. When Nico Harrison took over in 2021, the Mavericks had Kristaps Porziņģis and Jalen Brunson flanking Dončić. They lost both essentially for nothing. Dončić’s prime, at that point, was not in good hands.

Well, now the person shaping the organization as Dončić hits his theoretical peak will be Walter. No, he will not be making the basketball decisions, but his track record with the Dodgers speaks for itself. They haven’t missed the playoffs since his first season owning the team. They’ve made the World Series four teams, won it twice and have won more than 60% of their games. He’s going to put the right people in place to lead this team into the future. That’s no guarantee of anything, of course, but it’s a good sign for Dončić’s hopes of competing for titles in Los Angeles.

Loser: The competition

It wouldn’t quite be fair to say that the Buss-era Lakers were cheap. They have been the NBA’s seventh-highest net spender since 2017, according to Bleacher Report’s Eric Pincus. But… these are the Lakers. They print money. A team in Los Angeles with the biggest local television deal in the sport probably shouldn’t be outspent by anyone.

But the Lakers have been. While they’ve been willing to pay the luxury tax, they’ve typically been more eager to spend on big names than supporting pieces. The 2021 loss of Alex Caruso was a perfect example of that. There would have been no basketball cost to keeping him. It only would have cost money. They didn’t spend it. That thriftiness manifested more often off of the court. The Lakers have never been known for having a deep front office or investing heavily in off-court support. You can’t quantify the value those things have, but it’s significant.

The Lakers have always, for lack of a better term, hired within the family. They have had five lead executives under the Buss family. Bill Sharman was a former Lakers coach. Jerry West, Mitch Kupchak and Magic Johnson were Laker players. Rob Pelinka was Kobe Bryant’s agent. Many of their coaching hires have also had Laker ties. Members of the Buss family have held several prominent basketball operations roles over the years. Kurt Rambis and his wife Linda are infamously powerful within the organization. Some of these decisions have worked out better than others, but at the very least, it’s fair to say that running an organization in this manner is not optimal. Teams should search far and wide for the best talent. The Lakers do not.

They’ve still posed a significant challenge to the rest of the league because, well, they’re the Lakers. Players want to come to Los Angeles. They want to wear the purple and gold. But now that the Lakers are presumably going to be operated more like a standard big-market franchise and less like a family business, well, that spells trouble for the rest of the league, who can no longer count on the Lakers to get in their own way.

Winner: The rest of NBA owners

It’s no secret that the NBA is exploring expansion in the near future. One of the big rumors of the season was that expansion would come after a sale of the Boston Celtics reset the market for franchise prices. Boston sold for just over $6 billion, and Adam Silver has begun talking more seriously to the press about expansion ever since. Had the NBA sold expansion franchises for $5-6 billion apiece before this, it would have been counted as a tremendous success.

But $10 billion? That resets the market completely. No, other teams aren’t going to suddenly start selling for that price. These are the Lakers, after all. But a seismic sale like this has ripple effects throughout the market. No NBA team had sold for even $1 billion when Steve Ballmer bought the Clippers for $2 billion in 2014. But every franchise that has sold since 2016 has now gone for at least $1 billion, and several for a good deal more. The presumptive Las Vegas and Seattle teams won’t get $10 billion, but they’re worth more today because of what the Lakers just got.

The way expansion works is, a new owner essentially buys a non-existent team from the league. The existing owners split the sales price equally, so for now, it would be in 30 pieces. Every extra extra dollar is another three cents or so each team. Now multiply those three cents hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of times. The Buss family hasn’t just made money for themselves, but for every owner in basketball.

The Celtics had the second-biggest sale in history. It’s not as though they sold low. But, as we covered, the Lakers just reset the market. If the world knew the Lakers were getting $10 billion, it’s hard to imagine the Celtics not at least sneaking closer to $7 billion in their own sale. So on that front, this is a minor loss for the Grousbeck ownership group.

But on a deeper level… this is the greatest rivalry in basketball. Rivalries thrive on level playing fields. Well, the free market just showed us that the Lakers are worth a lot more than the Celtics. Does that affect either side on the court? No. But it’s gotta sting Boston’s ego to know how definitively they are the second financial fiddle in this relationship.

If it’s any consolation, Boston is quite used to that by now. They’ve occupied a similar role in baseball’s biggest rivalry, as the New York Yankees have far more financial power than the Red Sox do. Boston has twice as many championships this century, but their cost-cutting maneuvers in recent years have have caused a significant uproar among its fanbase. The Celtics are expected to cut costs in the near future as well, but that has more to do with the basketball implications of staying above the second apron than any cheapness. The Lakers are subject to those same rules, so it doesn’t sting quite as badly. This is mostly a matter of pride.

Winner: The Buss family

As successful as the Buss family has been in stewarding the Lakers, it’s important to remember that, in financial terms, they lack the resources of the Steve Ballmers of the world. Their wealth is not derived from outside ventures. It came almost entirely from the Lakers. They were by no means poor, of course, but in cash terms, they had less than your standard, big-market owners.

The Buss stake in the Lakers was held through a trust. There are six Buss siblings, and each of them has a one-sixth stake in that trust. Prior to this sale, the trust owned 66% of the team. At a $10 billion valuation, that 66% would net out $6.6 billion, or $1.1 billion per sibling. Now, we don’t yet know for sure what percentage of the team Walter bought aside from the fact that he now owns a majority. NBA rules dictate that a team governor must come from a group that owns at least 15%, so it’s possible that’s how much the Buss family kept, as Jeanie will remain in that role. But regardless of the final split, liquidating most of their ownership share just made all six Buss siblings a whole lot richer in practical terms.

Loser: Rob Pelinka

We don’t ultimately know where power in the Lakers organization is going to lie. Buss will ostensibly retain governorship, and according to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, she will keep it for “at least a number of years.” We can also be realistic here. Walter probably didn’t spend billions of dollars to let someone else run his team. If he wants to install his own people, it’s hard to imagine he won’t be able to.

When he bought the Dodgers, he quickly sought out the best executive possible to run his baseball operations. He landed on Andrew Friedman and poached him from the Tampa Bay Rays. Will he do the same for the Lakers? Only time will tell. Notably, though, there is a pretty well-known executive with Los Angeles ties that is currently doing broadcasting work for ESPN. Bob Myers built the Golden State Warriors. He went to UCLA. It’s hard not to think about him being for the Lakers what Friedman has been for the Dodgers.

Where does that leave Pelinka? For now, the job is his. The Dončić trade probably bought him a reasonable amount of job security. But his relationship with Buss, and by extension through his partnership with Bryant, the entire Laker organization, went a long, long way for him during a very shaky stretch of Lakers basketball. Remember, he has fired three separate coaches and been given the freedom to hire their replacements without any real scrutiny being put on his own performance. Even if LeBron James pushed for it, he ultimately traded for Russell Westbrook and let Caruso go. His performance has hardly been beyond reproach.

A change likely isn’t coming in the near term. Pelinka’s performance in the 2025 offseason is now paramount. If he can put a championship-level team around Dončić and James, his job is likely safe. But if this season goes poorly, without the security of the Buss family’s ownership, his seat could start getting very warm very quickly.