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If you’re Luka Dončić, the business of basketball is quite a thing.
Not only was he traded from the Dallas Mavericks, the team that drafted him, to the bright lights of the Los Angeles Lakers, seemingly without any advanced notice; he will, this season, be playing for his fifth different ownership group in the past three years.
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Mark Walter, who officially purchased a majority stake in the Lakers from the Buss family in October 2025, agreed last week — amid an ongoing federal investigation into alleged fraud in his lending practices — to sell control of the team to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner.
Neither Iger nor Kushner has ever run a professional sports franchise.
That may not seem like such a big deal. Dončić entered the NBA as the No. 3 overall pick (should have been No. 1), made the All-NBA First Team in his second season and earned a maximum designated rookie contract extension from the Mavericks. He now gets to play for the Lakers, the league’s most fabled franchise, on a three-year, $160 million extension.
Life is good.
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Except, for the most part, continuity wins in the NBA. Continuity in the ownership suite, across the front office and on the roster. Look across the league, and you will find that most successful teams have some level of continuity throughout their organizations. Rare is the owner, GM or even a player who instantaneously alters the course of a title.
Now, Dončić may be one of those players. His shocking arrival to L.A. — a deal made under the cover of night, reportedly without canvassing the league — reopened a title window that had closed as LeBron James and Anthony Davis aged out of their primes.
But in this NBA a player cannot win on his own. Your team cannot waste a dollar under the new collective bargaining agreement’s second apron, which acts as a salary cap. It has to be deep and balanced, and in order to be both, it must be a well-run organization.
Look at the Oklahoma City Thunder or San Antonio Spurs or, as wild as it is to say, even the New York Knicks (at least since Leon Rose assumed the team’s presidency in 2020). Consider the rival Boston…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/lakers-are-seemingly-doing-all-the-right-things–to-test-luka-doncics-patience-184616647.html
Author : Ben Rohrbach
Publish date : 2026-08-18 18:46:00
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