The ownership fight moves from the courtroom to the free-throw line, where it always belonged.
The Buss family's fight over the Lakers escapes the courtroom and lands where it belongs: a best-of-nine HORSE series at the practice facility. Blaze McQuire breaks down the rules, the combatants and the referee dragged out of a fishing cabin. The actual multibillion-dollar sale gets a paragraph, which is one more than it deserves.
The blue painter's tape went down at half-court in El Segundo before dawn on Saturday. A security guard walked nine paces behind the arc, marked the spot with a quarter, and stood over it like it was a grave.
Then the word came down. The Buss family will settle control of the Los Angeles Lakers with a best-of-nine series of HORSE, sibling against sibling, at the team's practice facility. Winner takes the reins. Losers take the stairs.
This is the fight of our lifetime. Forget the octagon. Forget the twelfth round in Vegas. Six heirs, one rim, and a franchise riding on a bank shot. Thermopylae had worse stakes and better parking.
The backdrop, for the paperwork crowd, is that Jeanie Buss moved to block her siblings' plan to sell the family's remaining 17.8% stake to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, per reports. Lawyers were filing things. Statements were being issued. Nobody was boxing out.
The series fixes that. Nine games, sudden death, no lawyers inside the three-point line.
The rules of engagement
Game one opens with called shots only. By game five, it is left hand exclusively, a rule one league source described as a meat grinder. Game nine, if it comes to that, is played in dress shoes, because ownership should hurt.
Dale Prunty of the league's newly formed Office of Competitive Resolution confirmed the format on Saturday. He did not blink once during a nine-minute availability.
"Courts of law decide who signs the checks. A court of hardwood decides who deserves to. We are done pretending those are the same thing."
Prunty added that the league considered arbitration. It was rejected as cowardice.
The combatants
Scouting reports are already circulating. One sibling reportedly owns a feathery mid-range game honed over decades of driveway warfare. Another is rumored to shoot line drives that could take out a drone. Our film room calls the matchup a coin flip with elbows.
Family conclave coordinator Marlys Feddersen, who is handling logistics, said the mood inside the compound is flint-hearted and focused.
"There will be no warmups," Feddersen said. "Warmups are for people who did not spend forty years preparing for this exact Saturday. Everyone arrives loose or arrives losing."
Retired referee Gus Okafor has been coaxed out of a fishing cabin to officiate. He brought his own whistle and a rulebook he claims predates the shot clock. "I have called games in hostile buildings," Okafor said. "I have never called a game where every rebound is worth a skyscraper. I slept fine anyway. Nine hours."
The undercard nobody asked about
In minor news barely worth the column inch, there is apparently still a legal dispute running in parallel, with filings and reporting and other paperwork-adjacent activity. We checked. No box score. Moving on.
Also lurking somewhere offstage: two of the richest men in American media, waiting to buy a slice of a basketball team. File that one under weather. A billionaire wanting the Lakers is not news. A fadeaway from nine paces with the season, the banners and Thanksgiving dinner on the line? That is news. That is the only news.
What's at stake
Everything. Sixteen banners hang in that gym like war medals. The winner controls the direction of the most storied franchise in the sport. The loser controls the aux cord on the ride home, and only if they ask nicely.
SnarkWire's tout board has the series dead even, with one caveat. Our senior handicapper, Fern Alcala, notes that HORSE rewards the ice-veined, and this family has been playing a version of it since the eighties. "The trick shot was never the layup line," Alcala said. "The trick shot was the boardroom. Now the boardroom has a rim."
Game one tips whenever the tape dries. Bring earplugs. Bring a flag to plant. And spare a thought for the lawyers, benched at last, watching from the bleachers like everyone else.
Footnotes.
