It’s the Rob Pelinka and Kurt Rambis show in the Los Angeles Lakers basketball operations for the foreseeable future.
After finally landing a head coach in Frank Vogel, as well as an assistant in Jason Kidd, and landing the No. 4 pick in the draft, Lakers owner Jeanie Buss doesn’t see any reason to mess with the Lakers front office.
ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported on Friday afternoon that the Lakers have chosen not to conduct a search for new President of Basketball Operations to replace Magic Johnson, who abruptly resigned from the position on the final day of their regular season.
The stage was set for this after the Lakers didn’t bother to hire anybody before conducting the head coaching search that eventually landed on Frank Vogel. Reports suggest that the fingerprints of Kurt Rambis, as well as his former colleague Phil Jackson, were all over the Vogel hiring.
Typically, you don’t let people hire a coach if you’re going to replace them with someone else. And the Lakers already did that once, hiring Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka to run the team with Luke Walton already entrenched as coach.
You can’t necessarily blame the Lakers for repeating their mistakes on this one, even if the decision to eschew a real search for someone to run their team is an odd one. But no matter what you think about it, the Pelinka-Rambis era of the Lakers is officially underway.
