Report Surfaces About Jeanie Buss' Major Issues With Lakers' LeBron James

The Los Angeles Lakers have always been a franchise surrounded by drama while making headlines for things that happen on and off the floor on a daily basis. The 2025-26 NBA season appears to be no different for the Lakers, with a controversial piece by ESPN's Baxter Holmes surfacing on Wednesday that is causing quite a stir.

The piece centers on the record-breaking sale of the storied franchise by the Buss family to Mark Walter and his ownership group for $10 billion, and on what led to the decision to sell the team, which has been family-owned since 1979, when Dr. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke for $67.5 million.

Holmes details how infighting within the Buss family led to the sale, with Jeanie Buss being the primary focus of the discord. However, some interesting tidbits surfaced about LeBron James, suggesting he rubbed the longtime team and governor the wrong way due to his ego, Klutch Sports having too much control, and the Russell Westbrook trade not going as planned.

Jeanie Proposed Trading LeBron to the Clippers

Apparently, Buss got so frustrated with James and all that comes with having him on the team that she wanted him traded to the Los Angeles Clippers, via Holmes.

In 2022, in the aftermath of the Westbrook trade, multiple people said Jeanie privately mused about not giving James a contract extension and, later that year, even about trading James, with the LA Clippers floated as a possibility. (This was before James received a no-trade clause in July 2024 after signing a new two-year, $104 million contract.)

Obviously, this is an unexpected development if true, as by all accounts it seemed as though Buss had a good relationship with the future Hall of Famer and thought highly of the impact he's made on the franchise since signing with the team in 2018.

Buss even went as far as to put James in the same conversation as Lakers legends Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson when asked who the five most important players in the team's history were, while on the All The Smoke podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson back in 2021.

“You have to start with Kareem and Kobe and LeBron,” Buss said. "Of course, Magic. Magic might be No. 1. No, Kareem. I don't know, it's so hard."

Lakers legend Jerry West wasn't too fond of Buss' list of the most important players in the team's history, as he admitted to being deeply offended by her comments, via Hoop Du Jour Podcast with Peter Vecsey, via CBS Los Angeles.

"I saw the other day Jeanie Buss made a statement, the five most important Lakers, one of the most offensive things I've ever heard in my life. I was there a lot of times, had a lot of success," West told Vescey. "Be curious to know if they would have had that success if I hadn't been there.

"And I don't ever take credit for stuff, I don't. When I was around, maybe I was just a good luck charm," West went on. "But I do know, that when this thing fell apart, there was a lot of years where they weren't very good."

She also compared James to a "superhero" while on the podcast with Barnes and Jackson.

"I like to say he's like the closest thing to a superhero I've ever met, in that he's so powerful and strong and smart, but he does things for the good," Buss said of James.

Clearly, there's some conflicting stances here from Buss and there's a chance she has said complimentary things about the four-time NBA champion to be safe from a PR perspective.

Only time will tell how this situation in Los Angeles plays out, but it could get ugly, especially with James in the last year of his contract with the Lakers and the real possibility that he could finish his NBA career elsewhere.