Lakers: "Legacy" Dives Into Magic Johnson's Abrupt Retirement From His Front Office Role
The excellent 10-episode Hulu documentary "Legacy: The True Story Of The L.A. Lakers" recently issued its last installment, recounting the first two seasons of the Lakers' current LeBron James-Anthony Davis era.
A big portion of that era involves Magic Johnson, the team's vice president of basketball operations who was a key figure in recruiting James to join L.A. as a free agent in 2018.
L.A.'s 2018-19 season ended with the team missing the NBA playoffs, following serious Christmas Day injuries to veteran leaders James and Rajon Rondo.
With the team out of the postseason push, Magic Johnson grew frustrated with what he felt was a lack of freedom in personnel decision-making. Head coach Luke Walton was not the right coach to lead L.A. to the promised land, Magic (correctly) intuited, and he wanted to move on. Team governor Jeanie Buss wanted to keep Walton, who had won titles as a reserve with L.A. in 2009 and 2010, on board. On April 9th, 2019, an hour before the final game of the season was set to tip off, Magic Johnson announced his retirement from his position as team president, right after a Walton press conference.
"It did catch us all.. by surprise," then-GM, now-team VP of basketball operations Rob Pelinka says now.
Johnson had not communicated his decision to Jeanie Buss beforehand. "First I felt blindsided, but then it started to feel familiar," Jeanie says in fresh interview footage. "In 1981, the same thing happened when Magic went to the media and said, 'I want to be traded,' instead of going to my dad [then-team owner Dr. Jerry Buss]."
Jeanie Buss did not call Johnson in the immediate aftermath of that decision. "It made the team look bad, it made me look bad, and I had to make sure that LeBron had two feet on the ground," she reflects.
"It was like a punch in the gut for sure," James says. "I was just thinking about the conversations that me and Magic had.. how we [were] going to put a trophy back here. Didn't understand. Still don't understand."
In footage from a Stephen A. Smith "First Take" conversation around that period, Johnson explained his decision thusly: "The straw that broke the camel's back was [that] I wanted to fire Luke Walton."
"I said, 'Jeanie, your man don't have it. He don't make adjustments within the game,'" Johnson explains in his "Legacy" interview
"One of the things that Jeanie was strong on is, you can't just keep changing coaches all the time," Shelburne says. "Jim and Mitch used to fire coaches like that, and I think she wanted to take [her] time with it."
"Other people in the Lakers, non-basketball people, are trying to tell me that I can't make those calls," Johnson remembers. "To preserve the love and my friendship with Jeanie, I felt it was best to step down."
"I really wanted Luke to be our coach but things had to be different," Buss offers.
By the way, Johnson was entirely right to want to do that. L.A. fired Walton in the offseason and brought in the much-better Frank Vogel. Jeanie Buss ultimately signed off on letting Walton go that summer. With Pelinka at the helm, the front office traded several young Lakers and future draft picks to the New Orleans Pelicans in exchange for Davis.
Walton went on to flounder as the Sacramento Kings' head coach, continuing that franchise's insane 16-year streak of missing the playoffs. Sacramento let Walton go after the Kings got off to a 6-11 start during the 2021-22 season.
