This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
So instead of the Dodgerfication of the Lakers, we’re getting the Disneyfication of the Lakers.
Yes, it’s weird and distressing, watching billionaires play catch with our ballclubs.
But this high-stakes game of hot potato that resulted in Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner acquiring the Lakers for $12.5 billion from Mark Walter less than a year after the Dodgers owner bought the NBA team?
For the Lakers, it really could end happily ever after.
Because we’re realizing you probably shouldn’t put all your proverbial eggs — or both of a city’s most beloved sports teams — in one guy’s basket. Especially if that one guy happens to be at the center of a federal loan investigation.
Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger were eyeing an NBA expansion team bid in Las Vegas but pivoted to buying the Lakers from Mark Walter, who bought a controlling interest in the team last year.
And if all it took, really, to get Walter to relinquish his ownership of the Lakers was $2.5 billion more than the reported figure he paid for them, then he wasn’t the right owner for the franchise anyway.
He wasn’t actually going to spin blue into purple and gold.
And Disney did give us some pretty great stories under Iger, didn’t it?
A native New Yorker, Iger, 75, grew up a Knicks fan. But he has also long been an L.A. basketball fan — though he has identified as a Clippers supporter. (Sorry, Clips, I think you’re down a fan.)
Lakers great Magic Johnson said he’s known Iger since the Showtime era, and gushed in an interview Wednesday with The Times’ Broderick Turner: “The great thing for Laker fans is Bob Iger loves basketball, loves the Lakers and I think that we couldn’t have a better person.
“Somebody that don’t know the Lakers, the tradition, that don’t know the city, that don’t know the passion that the fans have for the Lakers here in L.A.? Then I would have been like, ‘Oh man. They gotta learn all that.’
“Well there’s no learning curve for Bob.”
