A Hollywood Ending, page 13
Others were less effusive.
“How am I supposed to answer that?” McGee asked reporters. “How did I feel? Tingly inside? I don’t know.”
On a conference call with reporters after the deadline, Pelinka compared the Lakers to the New England Patriots, who had just won the Super Bowl after starting the season 1–2, thanks in part to wide receiver Julian Edelman returning from a suspension.
“I almost look at Bullock and Muscala, my hope is, much like Edelman was,” Pelinka said. “It’s just one player, but that can have such a big impact on overall chemistry, and I hope those two guys can come in and have that impact.”
The Lakers lost their next two games, dropping their record to 28–29. Heading into the All-Star break, they trailed the Sacramento Kings by two and a half games for the final playoff slot in the West. Even worse, they were under .500. It marked the first time since his rookie year that a LeBron-led team held a losing record that late in the season.
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In their first game out of the break, the Lakers put on one of their most impressive performances of the season, erasing a 19-point second-half deficit and knocking off the high-octane Rockets 111–106. LeBron led the way with 29 points, 12 rebounds, and six assists. Ingram poured in 27 points. Kuzma added 18. Rondo dished out seven assists in just 19 minutes. Bullock drilled four threes. Their defense held the Rockets to 29 percent shooting from deep.
It was a nearly perfect performance, an example of what the Lakers could look like when everything clicked.
“Tonight was a step in the right direction,” LeBron said after the game.
The good vibes didn’t last.
Two nights later, the Lakers fell to the Pelicans in New Orleans, 128–115—despite Davis watching from the sidelines. LeBron was great again and Ingram was good, but the rest of the team was not, particularly on defense, where the Lakers allowed the Pelicans to hit more than half their shots. Speaking to reporters after the game, LeBron cited a lack of “urgency” as one of the team’s problems that night and wasn’t coy about whom he thought was to blame.
“How many know what’s at stake if you’ve never been there?” he said of his teammates. By “there,” he meant the playoffs. He added, “The last few years, everyone’s so accustomed to the losses that I’m just not accustomed to. I’m not accustomed to it. I will never get comfortable with losing.”
The Lakers flew to Memphis that night and were off the next day. But LeBron’s teammates, having reached their boiling point, called a players-only meeting. They were sick of hearing LeBron criticize their effort but take possessions off, of hearing him talk about the importance of defending but then fall asleep on the backline (“This guy’s supposed to be the best in the world, and he’s not playing any fucking defense,” one young player complained to a staffer after an early-season loss), of seeing him celebrate individual accomplishments on social media after losses, of his seeming indifference to their feelings, like how he showed up to the facility the day after the initial Davis reports sporting a big smile. “He was just sipping tea from this electronically heated mug and goes, ‘What’s everyone so down about? It’s a beautiful day,’ ” a staffer recalled.
Some of LeBron’s actions were understandable. Missing multiple weeks with an injury was something he’d never dealt with before. Neither was being surrounded by players ten-plus years younger. But LeBron’s approach created an environment of distrust and, from there, finger-pointing. And in the eyes of his teammates, LeBron was too willing to lay the blame for the lost season at their feet.
That day in Memphis, the players met alone. Several spoke. Some called out LeBron for his body language during games, when cameras often caught him with his shoulders slumped or glaring at teammates.
“I tried to get LeBron to focus on his body language,” Rondo later recalled. “Those young guys were looking at everything he did. If they missed four shots in a row and LeBron was making a face, it was crushing to them. He was their Michael Jordan. They didn’t want to let him down. But if LeBron said one thing positive to Brandon Ingram or Kyle Kuzma, they immediately were back to their old selves.”
LeBron seemed to take the criticism to heart, but it was too late. The Lakers lost 11 of their next 13 games. The damage—in the standings, but also in the locker room—was done. And it was about to claim two casualties.
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When the Lakers first signed LeBron in the summer, Walton was ecstatic. That July afternoon, in the backyard of his Manhattan Beach home, Walton stepped away from his family barbecue and started reaching out to anyone he knew who had a history with LeBron or insight on how to coach a superstar. Walton was aware of how LeBron had clashed with Mike Brown in Cleveland; and how, early in his first season with the Heat, he had asked Pat Riley to replace Erik Spoelstra on the sideline; and how, in his return to Cleveland, he had tuned out David Blatt.
Walton spoke to Kobe. He spoke to Phil Jackson. He spoke to his dad, who happened to be at a concert with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. “The rhythm is the answer to everything in life,” Hart shouted over and over.
Walton spoke to Spoelstra and, while in Las Vegas for summer league the next week, met with Tyronn Lue. Both gave similar advice. LeBron was demanding of those around him, had high standards, and asked a lot of questions. But he was also the hardest worker they’d ever seen and the smartest player they’d ever coached. They told Walton that if he put in the work and was able to explain the reasoning behind his decisions, he and LeBron would get along great.
Walton’s first test came during training camp. At times, he’d be installing a scheme only for LeBron and Rondo to hijack the session. The two would spend ten minutes going back and forth about various counters while the rest of the team stood around struggling to keep up. “It was like watching two Rhodes scholars surrounded by a bunch of kids in kindergarten,” said a Lakers coach. “We’d be trying to put in A, and they’d already be on L, M, N, O, P, and Q.” Walton was happy to cede the floor. After all, why wouldn’t he listen to what LeBron, one of the greatest players of all time, had to say? But some in the building felt like Walton was allowing LeBron to usurp his authority, an accusation that would plague him all season.
Two weeks into the season, after being admonished by Magic, Walton was already on thin ice. Even Magic’s attempts at damage control hurt Walton’s standing. “He’s going to finish the year, unless something drastic happens, which it won’t,” Magic told the Los Angeles Times after the news of his berating Walton broke. That small window he had left open did not go unnoticed throughout the organization.
By November, Paul decided he was done with Walton, too. I just didn’t think he was a good coach, he told an associate years later. Paul started telling anyone who’d listen that Walton needed to be replaced. Management. Reporters. Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver, whom he ran into during a lunch in November. When Silver asked who the right coach was for the team, Paul suggested Lue.
By January, the locker room was revolting. Players and people close to them started grousing to reporters. Walton’s rotations, they said, were inconsistent. His offense, they said, was too simple. LeBron, they said, was allowed to do whatever he wanted. Walton had counters to all the attacks, which he shared with friends and reporters in private. The rotations were inconsistent because four key rotation players—Ball, Ingram, Rondo, and LeBron—had each missed at least 27 games with injuries. The offense was simple because new players were always being worked in and because so many of them were so young. He didn’t challenge LeBron because, well, he was LeBron, maybe the greatest player in the history of the game. Also, that wasn’t the sort of player-coach relationship Walton was looking to build. His goal was to form a partnership, one that would last long-term.
Every one of his points was valid. But they also didn’t matter. Fair or not, he’d lost the team. And from that there was no coming back.
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It was supposed to be a night of celebration.
On March 6, the Lakers welcomed the Nuggets to Los Angeles. Their season was on life support, but this night was going to provide a respite. LeBron was just 13 points away from passing Michael Jordan for fourth all-time in points scored. Moving ahead of Jordan, the player considered by many to be the greatest to ever play and someone LeBron had described as his idol, would be a momentous occasion. And it would give LeBron and Lakers fans something to celebrate together amid a lost season.
Except most Lakers fans didn’t really care. They had no history with LeBron, and so far, all he’d given them was one of the more disappointing seasons they’d ever experienced. The relationship was icy from the start, too. Part of it was because LeBron was being compared to Kobe, whose fans were as defensive and emotional as any in American sports; after LeBron signed, some street murals celebrating the news were vandalized with pro-Kobe messages. But part of it was also because Lakers fans, like his teammates, felt that LeBron wasn’t emotionally invested in them or the team.
That night against the Nuggets, the Lakers fell behind early in the first quarter. Then LeBron missed four straight free throws. The boos rained down, just like they had two nights earlier during a loss to the Clippers. When LeBron made the basket to pass Jordan—an and-one on the left side of the paint in the second quarter—the Lakers trailed by 18.
The reaction from Lakers fans inside Staples Center was subdued. It was “as if they were applauding an impromptu speech given by a distant uncle at an acquaintance’s wedding,” was how the Los Angeles Times’ Plaschke described it in a column. During the next break in action, LeBron grabbed a seat on the bench and used a towel to wipe tears from his eyes. “For a kid from Akron, Ohio, that needed inspiration and needed some type of positive influence, MJ was that guy for me,” he’d say after the game. “You guys have no idea what MJ did for me and my friends growing up, just in the sense of some days you don’t even feel like you’re going to make it to the next day where I grew up because of everything that’s going on.”
The Lakers lost 115–99, their fourth straight defeat and eighth in 10 games. Eleven days later, New York Knicks forward Mario Hezonja, a lead-footed wing on his way out of the league, swatted LeBron’s potential game-winning, last-second shot at the rim, just his eighth block of the season. Five days after that, LeBron slipped and lost the ball out of bounds with 22.9 seconds remaining in the game and the Lakers trailing the Nets by three. That loss, a 111–106 defeat, eliminated the Lakers from playoff contention.
Few things had gone right during the season, but at the top of the list was their inability to score. The Lakers finished with the league’s seventh-worst offense, and only the Suns connected on a lower percentage of their three-point attempts. Magic’s offseason strategy had backfired spectacularly.
“That experiment?” LeBron asked, when asked by McMenamin before the Nets loss what he thought of management’s decision to prioritize playmaking over shooting. LeBron paused, then “pursed his lips and stuck out his tongue as he trumpeted air out of his mouth,” McMenamin would later write when describing the interaction, “making a raspberry sound. ‘THBPBPTHPT!’ ”
One week later, with six games remaining, the Lakers shut LeBron down for the rest of the season.
From there, the spotlight shifted to Walton’s future. He wanted to come back and had pitched his case to Jeanie during a team flight back from Milwaukee in mid-March. Jeanie remained a fan, but two weeks later she told an interviewer that, despite thinking that Walton had done “a terrific job…in terms of basketball decisions, I will always defer to Magic.” Walton could read the writing on the wall. The Lakers, despite adding LeBron, had a nearly identical record to the previous season and would be missing the playoffs for the sixth straight year. He and Magic hadn’t spoken in weeks. He’d also gotten wind that the front office was trying to pin its emphasis on signing playmakers over shooters on Walton’s desire to play LeBron off the ball. “Luke knew he was getting fired,” said a person close to him. He drove into work on April 9 for the Lakers’ final game of the season, figuring it’d be his last time as the Lakers’ coach, especially when he was told that he’d be meeting with Magic the next day. During his pregame press conference, in a Staples Center hallway outside the locker room, a reporter asked if he had “anxiety” about his future with the Lakers.
“No anxiety,” Walton replied. “But call me later tonight, and the answer might be different.”
A few feet away, Magic was chatting with ESPN’s Rachel Nichols and a couple other reporters. “Just like we had done a bunch of times that season,” Nichols recalled. “Nothing felt different.” When Walton finished speaking with the media, Magic excused himself.
“I gotta go do something for a minute,” he said.
He made his way over to the scrum, where most of the reporters were still lingering, and parked in front of the Lakers banner the team used as a backdrop for press conferences. “Well, now I’m gonna go,” he said.
“We all sort of chuckled,” Bill Oram, the Lakers beat reporter for The Athletic, recalled. “And then he just started talking.”
The group figured he’d discuss the disappointing season and how he planned on getting things back on track. Instead, Magic opened by complimenting local broadcaster Jim Hill on an interview with LeBron that had aired on the local CBS affiliate the previous night. “I was riding here thinking about that incredible interview you had,” he said. On that ride, he added, he also thought about all the “great meetings I’ve had with Jeanie the last couple of days. And I love her as a sister.”
It was still unclear where this was heading. Until…
“So today, I’m going to step down as the president.”
Everyone present was stunned.
“I just remember my jaw dropping,” Nichols recalled.
The race to get the news onto Twitter began. Some began live streaming from their phones.
Magic, fighting back tears, explained his reasoning.
“I was like, ‘Damn, I got a great life outside of this. What am I doing?’ ” he said.
He said he’d cried on the way over to the arena that night. He said he’d have “more fun” serving as a “big brother and ambassador to everybody.” He said he’d recently received a call from Serena Williams asking him to “mentor me and be on my advisory board,” and that those were the types of ventures to which he wanted to devote time. He said he didn’t like all “the backstabbing and the whispering” and, when citing the people in the front office whom he enjoyed working with, didn’t mention Pelinka. He said that “tomorrow, I’d have to affect someone’s livelihood and their life,” meaning his plan to fire Walton, and he’d realized that was a pain he didn’t want to inflict.
“That’s not fun for me,” he said.
Most important of all, he said, he wanted to preserve his relationship with Jeanie, “my sister.” Jeanie had wanted to keep Walton, and while Magic said she gave him permission to fire him, Magic was worried that the disagreement would be the first step in the fraying of their bond.
“I don’t want to put her in the middle of us,” he said.
Then came perhaps the most shocking revelation of the night.
“She doesn’t know I’m standing here,” Magic said. “Because I’d be crying like a baby in front of her.”
He spotted Nichols in the crowd.
“Rachel! I’m free, my love,” he said.
“Did you really not tell Jeanie yet?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Magic replied. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand and tell her.”
Listening in from the back of the scrum was Brian Shaw, Walton’s associate head coach. After a few minutes, he scurried to the coaches’ room, where he found Walton sitting with Tim Harris, the Lakers’ president of business operations.
You guys knew Magic was stepping down and didn’t say anything? Shaw said.
What are you talking about? Harris asked.
They turned on the TV and saw the news. Harris, in shock, rushed out of the room to call Jeanie. I got a flat tire. I’m on my way, I’ll be there soon, she said before he could get in a word.
Turn around, Harris said. Magic just quit.
What are you talking about? Jeanie asked.
Harris passed along everything he knew. He told her to meet him at the office, where they’d lay out a plan for moving forward. Jeanie hung up and turned the radio on. Magic was still talking, and his press conference was being broadcast live.
Around the same time, Randy Mims, LeBron’s chief of staff, found LeBron in the training room, where he was stretching.
Magic just stepped down, he said.
LeBron figured his friend was kidding. “I was like, ‘Man, get the fuck out of my face, you bullshitting,’ ” he recalled. Then he pulled out his phone. It wasn’t a joke.
“It was weird for him to just be like, ‘I’m out of here,’ ” he’d later say.
Meanwhile, Magic was rolling. The longer he talked, the more loose he became. As the news had trickled out, the crowd surrounding Magic swelled. He spotted ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne. “Ramona,” he said, “you called me; what’s up?” He spotted Lee Zeidman, the president of Staples Center. “Lee, thank you, man, for the suite, the tickets, the concerts.” He shouted out the former players and Lakers broadcasters who’d swung by. He talked about how excited he was to go to Dodgers games.
