Phil Jackson Amid Championships and Dysfunction

ESPN Beto Duran and Arash Markazi talk legendary Phil Jackson and the Los Angeles Lakers.  Merely a handful of games into last season, the Lakers fired coach Mike Brown and triggered a buzz about the Zen Master returning to the bench.

We Chicago fans view Jackson as one of our own, as he steered the Bulls to two three-peat championships in the fabulous 1990s.  His sixth and final run was the 1997 - 1998 season.  He took a year off, then proceeded to win another three-peat with the Lakers.  He won two more championships, before retiring at the end of the 2010 - 2011 campaign.

Add the two he won as a player, and the legend has 13 rings to slip onto his fingers and spill over onto his toes.  I myself was buzzing a year ago, when Brown was fired, as Jackson came to mind immediately.  It didn't matter where he coached.  I just wanted to see him coach again, and run a team as masterfully as he had done before.

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I say, If the Heat don't three-peat, LeBron bolts for LA next year.

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Say you're LeBron, and this man is sitting across the table from you.  It doesn't who else is there, and it doesn't matter where you all are.  The decision is a no-brainer:  You play for him!

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Jerry Buss was the majority owner of the Lakers, and from 1979 until his death earlier this year, he engineered 10 championships.  Five of which Jackson coached.  Just as he had arranged years before he died, his family retains ownership of the Lakers - Buss family won't sell Lakers - with his children Jim and Jeanie as executives running the team.

Regardless, we're now into the second generation of a family-owned business, and there is a greater likelihood of failure at this stage.

Wait, there's fuel added to the fire - Jeanie Buss felt betrayed by Lakers:  

Jeanie Buss, the chief of the Los Angeles Lakers' business operations and fiancee of Hall of Famer Phil Jackson, wrote in an upcoming update to her "Laker Girl" memoir that she felt the hiring of Mike D'Antoni as head coach last year instead of Jackson was "a betrayal." 

Buss, in an excerpt published Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, wrote she felt she "got played," referring to the decision ultimately made by her brother Jim, which she has said took her and Jackson by surprise and had been an unsettling experience. 

"Why did they have to do that?" Jeanie Buss wrote in the November edition of the book first published in 2010. "Why did Jim pull Phil back into the mix if he wasn't sincere about it? ... 

"Phil wasn't looking for the job, and then he wasted 36 hours of his life preparing for it when they were never in a million years going to hire him anyway. 

"How do you do that to your sister? How do you do that to Phil Jackson?"

ESPN Colin Cowherd sounded off on Lady Buss' statement, and rips her for coming out with something that she ought to have addressed with her brother privately.  He's right.

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I wonder, How much dysfunction lies in that fateful Buss second generation, and will it relegate the stirring Lake Show to a faded Side Show?

Me (shrug).

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD