New Lakers Rumors Reveal Players, Staff Were 'Turned Off' by 'Arrogance' of Dodgers' Impact on Team

There are employees within the Los Angeles Lakers who reportedly aren't terribly upset by Los Angeles Dodgers' owner Mark Walter selling the team to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner for $12.5 billion.

According to Dan Woike of The Athletic, "The pending changes—Iger and Kushner's groups are in their 'diligence' phase of the purchase—have certainly caused some anxiety for employees bracing for another ownership change. The last transition, from the longstanding familial touches of the Buss family to a more bottom-line-driven Walter regime, included multiple rounds of layoffs. Still, multiple sources in different departments expressed optimism about the direction of the franchise under Iger and Kushner. Some felt the Dodgers' impact on the Lakers was pushing too hard toward analytics and doing so with an arrogance that turned off some people in basketball operations and the locker room. Those people weren't upset to see a pathway for new management to come in, even if it's a bit of a mystery and doesn't have the track record of the Dodgers' success."

Walter officially purchased a majority stake in the Lakers in Oct. 2025, but his tenure lasted less than a year, and his sale to Iger and Kushner stunned the NBA world.

"People don't buy teams and turn around and sell them," an Eastern Conference executive told ESPN's Dave McMenamin earlier in August. " So there are obviously other factors driving this decision outside of just the mere fact that somebody showed up to pay $12.5 billion. Those factors have to be well outside of basketball."

Ultimately Walter turned a tidy $2.5 billion profit off his brief spell as the team's owner, though it sounds as if some folks within the basketball side of the organization won't be sad to see him go.