The circus that is the Los Angeles Lakers keeps churning.
A few days ago, Bleacher Report’s Ric Bucher reported that part of the reason team president Magic Johnson suddenly resigned from his position was that he read e-mails between team owner Jeanie Buss and general manager Rob Pelinka criticizing him. Bucher claimed that the duo had accidentally cc’d Johnson in the ongoing thread.
If that seemed far-fetched to you (we chose not to run it as a report on our site), that’s because it really might have been.
According to Sam Amick and Bill Oram of The Athletic, there is no truth to that report at all:
The real reasons for Magic’s departure remain somewhat murky, but a source with knowledge of the situation adamantly denied the report indicating that Jeanie had mistakenly shared e-mails with Johnson that were critical of his job performance.
Of course, because it’s the Lakers, there was reason to believe that something like that was plausible. Johnson spoke about being tired of the back-stabbing during his impromptu press conference. Just the other day, he sent out a cryptic tweet about the truth being set free.
No one really knows why Magic stepped down. It certainly could have been due to some backstabbing from Pelinka and there has been a little smoke there. But regardless of how often the Lakers don’t run their organization like the multi-billion dollar business that it is, it was always hard to believe that they could not double check the recipients before they sent out multiple e-mails about an employee’s poor performance.
