Lakers' Jeanie Buss Responds To Report She Almost Traded LeBron James

The February 5 NBA trade deadline is looming, and some of your favorite teams are signaling that there’s trouble in paradise. But when you’re the Los Angeles Lakers, the dirty laundry gets aired out in a lengthy ESPN feature by Baxter Holmes.

The main focus of the piece was the Buss family’s infighting and how it drove a wedge between front-facing team executive Jeanie Buss and her siblings, leading to her firing them all and selling the team for a $10 billion valuation.

But tons of other noteworthy Lakers-related tidbits were covered, including her disdain for the team’s biggest star, LeBron James.

After landing in Los Angeles in 2018, Jeanie privately didn’t like that he was “considered a savior for a floundering franchise” rather than the leadership team receiving credit for successfully courting him.

Even with James leading the Lakers to their 18th championship in 2020, she felt James had an “outsized ego” and thought Klutch Sports often had too much say in executive decisions.

Jeanie and James’ relationship fractured even more when he spearheaded a trade for Russell Westbrook in July 2021. But the Westbrook experiment failed as the team missed the playoffs, and Jeanie was doubly upset because James “seemed to wash his hands of his role in the acquisition.”

Baxter Holmes reports that “Jeanie privately bristled about what she felt was his lack of accountability and the way James would shift blame onto others after the Westbrook trade.”

It angered her so much that she secretly considered not giving James a contract extension and even trading him to the LA Clippers. She ultimately “begrudgingly” gave him the extension and later, a no-trade clause because she knew the team would “take a massive PR hit” if they didn’t.

Even the Bronny James draft pick left a sour taste in her mouth, with people close to the team revealing she thought “that James should be grateful for such a gesture, but she felt that he wasn’t.”

Jeanie has since released a statement to The Athletic, focusing not on the validity of her family’s messiness, but solely on what she reportedly said about LeBron.

“It’s really not right, given all the great things LeBron has done for the Lakers, that he has to be pulled into my family drama. To say that it wasn’t appreciated is just not true and completely unfair to him.”

While James hasn’t answered, Rich Paul did on his Game Over podcast, “Who gives a sh-t?”

See social media’s reaction to the Lakers’ drama below.