Lady of the Lakers

This drew the ire of her brother Johnny. “I read in the paper that my brother is fired, publicly,” Johnny Buss stated. “I called my brother and he said, ‘I had no idea that Jeanie could fire me in the first place.’” A authorized brawl between the siblings cemented Jeanie’s management.

Johnny, the proprietor of the Ice House Comedy Club, stated he now isn’t chatting with his brother Jim and maintains an emotional distance from the administration of the household enterprise and from the sister in cost. “Jeanie really matured in the last two years, to a point I’m really proud of her, but it doesn’t mean I’ll talk to her much,” he stated. (A lawyer for Jim Buss couldn’t be reached for remark.)

Ms. Buss makes no apologies. “My dad had his children, but the Lakers was his baby,” she stated. “My father said, ‘You are ultimately in charge, you have to protect the baby.’”

Hiring Mr. Johnson, she stated, “put us back on a path to stability and respectability.”

But in 2019, lower than a yr after he helped to signal LeBron James, Mr. Johnson give up, telling the press earlier than Ms. Buss. “If I talked to her first,” stated Mr. Johnson, “I would have never stepped down, that’s why I had to do it the way I did it. We would have been in the room crying together.”

His exit — “the Magic abdication,” as Mr. Jackson referred to as it — drew all of the media scrutiny of royal household drama.

“I wish it had been handled less publicly,” Ms. Buss stated. But she confirmed herself to be the membership’s regular chief amid crushing stress: the demise of Mr. Bryant and a pandemic that pushed the grieving workforce into an remoted bubble, away from household and indifferent from a civil rights motion of non-public relevance to many gamers. “I get a lump in my throat just thinking about what the players did under the most difficult circumstances,” she stated.