The Lakers' current struggles to return to their place among the NBA elite is hard to understand, considering one of their key decision-makers during their 2000s glory decade remains with the team.
Or so Jim Buss would have you believe.
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Buss said he believes the reason he's received so much criticism for the current state of affairs in Los Angeles is that he never told those critics how integral he was to the Lakers' success when Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, Derek Fisher, Robert Horry, etc. ... were in their primes, according to USA Today Sports.
"(If) I would have taken credit for all the moves we won championships for, then I would have a resume; I don't have a resume," said Buss, who has been on board for five Lakers titles since he first joined and whose bio in the team's media guide is approximately one quarter the size of (general manager Mitch) Kupchak's. "So my resume is just me all of a sudden taking over, which isn't true. It's not true at all. The thing that most people don't understand is that I've been doing this for 20 years. I worked with Jerry West. I've done this, and I've said these things. But it doesn't have any teeth, doesn't have any legs. I was very much part of the final decisions on all of the championships that we've won in the last 20 years.
"I was extremely involved on both the basketball and the financial side, but there was no point for me to go out and wave my flag. It didn't make sense to me. Now I understand that I should have, to a certain degree."
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West, who brought Shaq and Kobe to Los Angeles and captured titles from 2000-02, and Kupchak and Phil Jackson, who surrounded Bryant with Derek Fisher, for a second stint, with Gasol and Andrew Bynum, are generally considered the Lakers' championship architects.
In that sense, Buss is correct. No one has ever given him credit for helping put together those teams.
The most noteworthy things Buss has done is hire Mike Brown to replace Jackson to start the 2012-13 season, fire Brown after five games and bypass Jackson to hire Mike D'Antoni and sign an injury-prone and aging Bryant to a two-year, $48.5 million contract.
To his credit, he did sign Chris Paul in a deal that the NBA mysteriously rescinded, and he did bring in Dwight Howard and Steve Nash after the Paul deal fell through. No one foresaw the disastrous 2012-13 season with Howard, Bryant, Gasol and an injured Nash.
Buss promoted analytics, USA Today Sports reported, at a time when the Lakers organization resisted change. The Lakers VP said West wrote him a letter of encouragement, validating his work.
"He wrote me a letter just on the cruelty of the media of what I was going through. It's unreal. He sits there and he talks about 'You have to understand that these are people who have no idea what they're talking about. They have a motive. They have an agenda. Don't take it wrong. You're doing the right thing.' It just went on and on, unprovoked. It was like, 'OK, thank you.'"
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