Nothing is more important to Jeanie Buss than the Lakers, including fiancé Phil Jackson.
The Lakers president, who met with Carmelo Anthony during the summer in hopes of luring the free agent away from New York, acknowledged Thursday it was strange to be pursuing a player who was also being courted by Jackson — the new Knicks president — but Buss said helping the Lakers get back to greatness is her biggest priority.
“It was a little bit awkward during that time period, but I’ll tell you that Carmelo is a player that’s worth fighting for,” Buss said during an appearance on ESPN. “In basketball, family, love, relationships, nothing is more important to me than the Lakers. That’s my passion. That’s No. 1 to me, so I’ll do it again.”
Awkwardness is nothing new for the couple, whose courtship began in December 1999 while Jackson was in his first season as head coach of the Lakers, working for Buss’ father, Jerry, the longtime owner of the team, who passed away in January 2013.
Jackson, 69, and Buss, 53, faced another strange situation in 2012, when Jackson was approached about returning to the Lakers as coach for a third stint, after the early-season firing of Mike Brown, but Buss’ brother, Jim, passed over the 13-time champion in favor of Mike D’Antoni.
“Why did they have to do that?” Jeanie Buss, who handles the business side of the Lakers, wrote in her memoir, “Laker Girl.” “Why did Jim pull Phil back into the mix if [Jim] 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?”
When Jackson joined the Knicks in March, the decision to join a different organization was made easy because Buss said “there [was] no role for him, for what he could contribute,” since Buss’ brother, also a co-owner, held the basketball operations role, which Jackson was most interested in.
Thus began the unique circumstance in which Jackson and Buss are each executives of the two most valuable franchises in the NBA, which looked into the situation to address any issues of impropriety.
“To avoid even the appearance of a conflict, we have addressed the issue with the Knicks and Lakers to ensure that the relationship between Jeanie Buss and Phil Jackson will not affect how the teams operate,” NBA spokesman Mike Bass said upon Jackson’s hiring.
The now bicoastal relationship began north of the border, as the couple first hit it off after having a drink together following NBA meetings in Vancouver. The spark continued on a flight back to Los Angeles the next day, as described in Buss’ book:
“As the first-class passengers were called, I asked if she was going to board the plane, but she said she flew coach, explaining that flying first class wasn’t necessary and that the Lakers didn’t need the added expense,” Jackson writes in the foreword to the book. “Let’s just say that was the beginning of something special.”
Jackson coached the Lakers for 11 seasons until retiring from the sidelines in 2011. After living with Buss for several years in Playa del Rey, Calif., Jackson, who has been married twice previously, proposed to her on Christmas morning in 2012.
As for landing Anthony, it would have given the Lakers their latest in a long line of superstars in their primes, an objective more pressing than ever for a team quickly falling apart.
Citing multiple anonymous sources, an ESPN.com article recently blamed the Lakers’ fall from the league’s elite on Kobe Bryant, due to his taking up so much cap space with his high salary, as well as other players’ reluctance to play with him because of his personality. One of those quotes was attributed to an anonymous source close to the team.
“I don’t agree with any of it,” Buss said. “If there’s anybody on our payroll saying those things, I’ll soon get to the bottom of it and they will not be working for us anymore.”