{"id":882515,"date":"2026-09-04T02:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T02:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/882515\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T02:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T02:30:15","slug":"lakers-employees-were-turned-off-by-arrogance-of-dodgers-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/882515\/","title":{"rendered":"Lakers employees were turned off by \u2018arrogance\u2019 of Dodgers\u2019 approach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">There\u2019s no question that the Dodgers\u2019 approach to baseball has been successful. Under Mark Walter, the team has morphed into a dynasty.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">It made sense, then, to try to replicate that approach with the Lakers once he took charge. However, it wasn\u2019t exactly a smooth process attempting to do so.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Call it reluctance by the Lakers to adapt. Call it an inability to communicate their approach by the Dodgers. But the end result, as reported recently by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/7550685\/2026\/08\/31\/lakers-ownership-employees-buss-family-iger-kushner\/?unlocked_article_code=1.9lA.0sYt.iaXrLm8UKX0E&amp;source=emp_shared_article&amp;smid=ta-ios-share\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Dan Woike of The Athletic<\/a>, was some Lakers staffers being rubbed the wrong way by the Dodgers\u2019 staffers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1bij9g79 _1bij9g78 _1mt21p01\">Still, multiple sources in different departments expressed optimism about the direction of the franchise under Iger and Kushner. Some felt the Dodgers\u2019 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\u2019t upset to see a pathway for new management to come in, even if it\u2019s a bit of a mystery and doesn\u2019t have the track record of the Dodgers\u2019 success.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Skepticism about whether the Dodgers\u2019 analytics-heavy approach would work in the NBA is understandable. In baseball, every event is isolated, making it easier to manipulate or exploit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">In basketball, everything flows from one end to the other, so analytics play a different role. Analytics still have a role in the game, but a different one than in baseball.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">At the same time, the Lakers\u2019 front office is full of people who have mostly done things one type of way for a long time. Change isn\u2019t hard and isn\u2019t always well-received, even with the best of intentions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">Having said all that, it also feels entirely possible that the Dodgers, knowing that they\u2019ve had success and the Lakers largely haven\u2019t, could have come in with a sense of superiority. Deserved or not, it could have led to a rocky relationship between the two sides.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1upudxki _174s0un1 _174s0un0 _1mt21p01\">It\u2019s really impossible to tell which of these options, or combinations of them, is the truth. For better or worse, the truth won\u2019t matter much anymore either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s no question that the Dodgers\u2019 approach to baseball has been successful. Under Mark Walter, the team has&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,87289,459,82],"class_list":["post-882515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-lakers-news","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}