Playoffs? Will Magic step down as promised if no POs?

Magic is going nowhere. Walton will go first.

What the Lakers do have is the LA scene and players can mingle with the movie stars and dream of a life in the movies or become some trashy social media stars like Kayne West and the sick Kardashian family.

Uncle Drew went straight to Irving's head he has a full time acting coach . I'm not sure he will end up there but you can bet on LA getting a free agent with consierable talents. Someone will take the bait.

The Celtics have deep seated issues taking the east i'm not convinced why we should be so worried about the Lakers. Golden State and a couple more western teams are much more of a priority.

Fine and it looks like James gets to stay and Walton is walking out the door.

Rondo retires and coaches LA next year?

Sounds like jolly fun

No to both. IT is shooting worse than Rondo and Rondo is smarter than Stevens. If the midget comes back i'm gone and im quite serious.


Little Lumpy in the rear Pud?  Don't have those problems yet and you can drop your pants on the street in Matagalpa no one cares.

Magic Johnson Steps Down As Lakers’ President Of Basketball Ops
by Luke Adams
Holding an impromptu press conference on Tuesday evening, Magic Johnson announced that he has stepped down as the Lakers‘ president of basketball operations (Twitter link via Bill Oram of The Athletic).

According to Johnson, he hadn’t informed Lakers owner Jeanie Buss of his decision before publicly announcing his decision. Referring to Buss as a sister, Johnson said he “had more fun” when he was able to be “the big brother and the ambassador” rather than the Lakers’ ultimate decision-maker (Twitter link via Oram).

“Somebody’s going to have to tell my boss because I knew I couldn’t be face-to-face and tell her,” Johnson said, per Oram. “… I couldn’t stand to tell her.”

The shocking announcement comes on the heels of a report from Oram which suggested that Johnson has been viewed as an “absentee executive.” According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (via Twitter), Johnson never fully committed to the job and had limited office hours during his tenure. He was traveling and away from the team frequently, and didn’t do much scouting, per Woj.

Speaking to reporters tonight, Johnson said that his position with the Lakers hasn’t allowed him to be a statesman for the NBA, a role he enjoys and one he’s looking forward to resuming (Twitter link via Dave McMenamin of ESPN.com). Johnson also repeatedly said that he was happier before being hired by the assuming the role of Lakers head of basketball operations, adding that it’s a “monkey off [his] back” to step away from the position (Twitter links via Oram and Brad Turner of The L.A. Times).

Johnson’s surprise resignation raises many more questions about the Lakers’ upcoming offseason. There was a widespread belief that head coach Luke Walton would be let go at season’s end, and while Johnson said tonight that his decision wasn’t about Walton, he also acknowledged that it made him uncomfortable to be in a position to be in a position between Buss and Walton, who are close (Twitter link via Oram).

“[Buss] told me yesterday you have the power [to make the decision on Walton],” Johnson said tonight, according to Oram (Twitter link). “… I didn’t want to put her or myself in that situation.”

With Johnson no longer around to make that decision, it’s not clear if Walton is now in position to keep his job or if Magic’s replacement would still want to bring in his own coach. The Lakers’ coaching staff had believed for months that they’d be fired at the end of the season, Wojnarowski notes (via Twitter).

The truth is people just aren't clamouring to play with LeBron anymore, and that was their draw. It started with Paul George. Speaking of which, big win tonight for the thunder.

No Playoffs for LeBron James, No Job for Magic Johnson. Why the Lakers Fell Apart.


LOS ANGELES — Hours after Magic Johnson abruptly resigned as the Los Angeles Lakers’ president of basketball operations and mere minutes after his first season as the franchise cornerstone ended with a buzzer-beating loss, LeBron James left Staples Center on Tuesday night without speaking to reporters, trailed only by security officers and questions about the team’s future.

It was not the season anyone envisioned for the Lakers, who had upended the N.B.A. by signing James last summer with the hype and expectation of returning the franchise to its glory years. One of the most storied teams in the league, it has not won a championship in nine years, and Los Angeles is frustrated, hungry and impatient.

Instead, the team collected nearly as many injuries as losses. James, who will miss the N.B.A. playoffs beginning Saturday for the first time in 14 years, watched the final six games of the season from the bench as the team looked to preserve him for next season. His next buzzy stop is a studio lot as the star of “Space Jam 2,” which he has said is set to begin filming this summer.

For the Lakers (37-45), all the drama was off the court, right up to the end, with Johnson’s abrupt announcement so out-of-the-blue that he had not even told his boss, the team owner Jeanie Buss, before wading into a gaggle of reporters.


Johnson had sealed a $154 million, four-year deal for James, two greats fulfilling their needs, Johnson to restore luster to a glamorous team, James to close out his career as a Laker and develop his business and entertainment interests centered on Hollywood.

And now they both left Staples Center with a losing record and a team in chaos.

In some ways, it was the perfect finale to a season that trafficked in dysfunction.

So there was the coach, Luke Walton, saying what losing coaches always say, essentially wait until next year. His job may have been saved when Johnson quit, but he would not talk about that.

“We have a lot of time to work and get better,” Walton said late Tuesday after the Lakers’ loss to the Portland Trail Blazers. “Let’s organize and prioritize what we need to do so we can give ourselves a better chance next season.”

Magic Johnson abruptly resigned on Tuesday night.CreditMark J. Terrill/Associated Press


It was a wasted season for everyone involved, and James is as polarizing as ever, even in Los Angeles, where as much as fans banked on him, they also retained a degree of skepticism that this was all real.

Jonas Never, a prominent Los Angeles-based street artist, found that out the hard way.

“Honestly,” Never said in a telephone interview, “Lakers fans are the trickiest.”

He had talked a restaurant owner in Venice Beach last July to allow him to paint a mural of James in a Lakers jersey to commemorate his arrival, 75 cans of spray paint in 12 hours for the “King of L.A.”

It did not take long for the mural to be vandalized — not just once, but twice in a span of four days. The first time, it was salvageable. Someone had defaced the wall with the words “We Don’t Want You” and “No King,” along with “3-6,” a reference to James’s losing record in the N.B.A. finals. But Never was able to restore the mural. (“A two-minute fix,” he said.)

The second time, someone splashed yellow paint all over James’s face, and Never had no choice but to paint over it.

“If it had been a car, it would have been totaled,” he said.

To be fair, most fans were excited about James. The news media coverage was breathless. And perhaps no member of the ticket-paying public had invested more in LeBron-to-L. A. than Jacob Emrani, a personal injury lawyer from Beverly Hills, Calif., who had purchased space for 40 James-themed billboards in the run-up to free agency.

“I definitely didn’t think it was going to be something where we missed the playoffs or thought, ‘What the hell is happening here?’ ” Emrani said in an interview. “I’m disappointed in the breaks we got, but I’m not necessarily disappointed in LeBron. We were in fourth place when he went down.”

Emrani was referring to what might have been the season’s turning point, the Lakers’ ill-fated Christmas Day game against the Golden State Warriors, which James himself cited in a recent interview with Spectrum SportsNet, the Lakers’ broadcast partner. The Lakers were playing solid basketball at the time — in fact, they clobbered the Warriors to improve their record to 20-14 — but James injured his groin in the first half and wound up missing the next 17 games. The Lakers went into a tailspin without him.

“Disappointed in my body,” James told Spectrum SportsNet, adding: “Because I knew exactly where we were at that point. And we just were never able to get back from that.”

Once James returned, the team’s front office unsuccessfully tried to engineer a trade for another big star, the New Orleans Pelicans’ Anthony Davis — this, after James had told ESPN that it would be “amazing” to play alongside Davis.


The plan appeared to be to essentially trade away the rest of the team. The fallout was clear: Whatever fragile bonds that remained in the home locker room at Staples Center seemed to fray at the seams.

For many fans, it was impossible to dissociate James from the failed trade — James and Davis share an agent, Rich Paul — and much of the mess that followed.

“Nearly everyone on the roster was involved in those trade rumors,” Never said. “How can you really feel wanted if you think you’re going to be packing your locker the next day?”

As the losses mounted, so did the criticisms of James: that he appeared detached from his teammates, that basketball was secondary to his growing interest in his entertainment company, that his body was finally breaking down after so many years of athletic genius, that he was no longer capable of carrying a team to a title.

But in the 55 games that James did play in this season, he was pretty good. He averaged 27.4 points, 8.5 rebounds and 8.3 assists a game while shooting 51 percent from the field. Besides, a long summer may benefit him after so many extended playoff runs.

“The only thing that was hard was that he got hurt,” Walton said late Tuesday night. “It takes time to build a relationship with somebody. But as our relationship grew and I got to see what it was like coaching him, it was great. And I believe if we could have stayed healthy, we would have had a very successful season. He’s an incredible player.”

For his part, James told Spectrum SportsNet that he wanted to use the summer to get his body back to “120 percent” ahead of training camp — even as he moonlights on the set of “Space Jam 2.” He has been adamant that his work in entertainment will not interfere with his work on the basketball court.

The question is whether one bad season will become two. So much hinges on the summer as the Lakers look to add another star to their roster. (Emrani said he had plans for more billboards, though he declined to say which top-tier free agents he would target.) James has said that he will be as involved in the team’s recruiting efforts as possible.

“I’m looking forward to seeing who jumps in the car with me and wants to take this ride to the top,” James said in his interview with Spectrum SportsNet. “I know what I bring to the game. I know my commitment to the game. I’ve never cheated the game, and throughout my career, it’s always given back to me.”