Bob Iger could be the Imagineer to lead the Lakers

So instead of the Dodgerfication of the Lakers, we’re getting the Disneyfication of the Lakers.

Hakuna Matata?

Yes, it’s bizarre and distressing, watching billionaires play catch with our ballclubs.

But this high-stakes sport of sizzling potato that resulted in Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner buying the Lakers for $12.5 billion from Mark Walter less than a yr after the Dodgers proprietor purchased the NBA staff?

For the Lakers, it actually could end fortunately ever after.

Because we’re realizing you most likely shouldn’t put all your proverbial eggs — or both of a metropolis’s most beloved sports activities groups — in one man’s basket. Especially if that one man occurs to be at the heart of a federal loan investigation.

And if all it took, actually, to get Walter to relinquish his possession of the Lakers was $2.5 billion more than the reported determine he paid for them, then he wasn’t the proper proprietor for the franchise anyway.

He wasn’t really going to spin blue into purple and gold.

And Disney did give us some fairly great tales under Iger, didn’t it?

A local New Yorker, Iger, 75, grew up a Knicks fan. But he has also long been an L.A. basketball fan — though he has recognized as a Clippers supporter. (Sorry, Clips, I feel you’re down a fan.)

Lakers great Magic Johnson said he’s identified Iger since the Showtime period, 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.”

And Angelenos know Iger. We don’t know Kushner besides for his household ties. But Iger, we do.

Walter isn’t promoting the Lakers to some wealthy guys without any L.A. cred. He’s promoting to a basketball fan whom we’ve seen courtside at Lakers video games. Someone who joined us in sharing our heartbreak on social media when Kobe Bryant died in 2020, calling him “a friend and a fan of ours, full of life and taken from us too soon.”

We acknowledge Iger; he’s the Disney man. We know him for his profitable tenures as chief govt of that beloved company, which have been highlighted by progressive storytelling, savvy investment and enlargement — including into sports activities. We know he helped flip ESPN into a TV juggernaut.

Before the sale to Walter, the Buss household, which owned and ran the Lakers for 46 years, was having hassle maintaining up in a booming NBA. Player salaries are capped, but possession’s sources matter a lot in phrases of creating a aggressive infrastructure of coaches, basketball operations, medical and scouting staffs.

So we have been trying ahead to seeing sweeping enhancements when Walter took control and supplied the group with a much-needed financial infusion. After all, his Dodgers have received three World Series crowns and clinched the National League West in 12 of 13 seasons since 2012, when he and his companions purchased the membership for a then-MLB file $2.15 billion.

But as of Wednesday morning, we have been still trying.

We thought the new Lakers’ regime would get to work without a second to spare. Yeah, they added a second row of seats courtside. And laid off more than a dozen staff.

We anticipated they’d beef up their scouting division. But they moved the G League staff from the South Bay manner out to the Coachella Valley, so even the most ardent followers in L.A. may have a laborious time maintaining an eye on the staff’s prospects.

We anticipated, under Walter, that the Lakers would give their basketball mind trust an apparent enhance.

But they’ve only flirted with filling the job of second assistant basic supervisor. And they failed to poach anybody from the league’s most progressive entrance places of work like the Dodgers did when they employed Andrew Friedman. Their big get was Rohan Ramadas, from the … New Orleans Pelicans, a staff that made the playoffs only twice in the last eight seasons.

Iger and Kushner can do better. They better do better.

Joshua Kushner, founder and chief govt of Thrive Capital, speaks onstage during the Big Bets panel at the Fortune Global Forum 2024.

(Jemal Countess / Getty Images for Fortune Media)

I feel they’ll.

This isn’t a fly-by-night proposition for Iger, who headed an effort by the Chargers and Raiders to construct a stadium in Carson before Stan Kroenke constructed $5-billion SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

In 2024, Iger and his spouse, Willow Bay, who is dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, acquired a controlling stake in the Angel City Football Club of the National Women’s Soccer League for $50 million, pushing its valuation to $250 million, a file for a girls’s sports activities staff.

Angel City hasn’t been profitable, but they doubled the employees and wasted no time setting up a sizable new efficiency heart at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. The WNBA’s Sparks, which Walter has owned since 2014, are still ready for their own observe facility, which is now finally under construction in El Segundo.

“As lifelong NBA fans,” Kushner and Iger said in a assertion, “we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world.”

Iger is aware of as a lot as anybody about efficiently stewarding an iconic model.

Now he could be the Imagineer to carry the 17-time champion Lakers back to the happiest place on earth — the NBA’s mountaintop.