Jeanie Buss came out of nowhere with a tweet that left social media buzzing over the weekend. She isn’t very active on the platform, tweeting at the absolute most four times per month. Her last two were about WOW Women of Wrestling, of which she is a co-owner, and the one before that was a retweet of a trailer for the upcoming multi-part Hulu documentary about the history of the Los Angeles Lakers. That was her activity for the month of June.
However, Buss opened July with something other than a promotion of content that she is producing. On Sunday she sent out a tweet that read more like a musing that she decided to share.
It starts with her missing Kobe Bryant, who she does tweet about from time to time. Then it goes on to talk about how much he valued team over self — him operating like that all the time is certainly debatable. “Your rewards would come if you valued team goals over your own then everything would fall into place.” Buss then let the world know that she doesn’t tweet often by ending it, “all can reply.” As long as the comment circle isn’t faded, that’s exactly how Twitter works.
Ignoring Buss deciding to explain how people have interacted on Twitter for 15 years, the rest of the tweet is quite deserving of the Druski “what do you mean by that” meme. Or, since she decided to share these thoughts that received 79,000-plus likes and more than 5,000 replies during a time when the NBA season is about nothing but speculation, maybe a meme of Brian Windhorst captivating the First Take desk, and a lot of social media, on the Friday before Independence Day by asking “What’s going on in Utah,” repeatedly for two minutes while slowly drawing a parallel between what new Utah Jazz general manager Danny Ainge did in building the current Boston Celtics roster by accumulating assets, and pointing out Ainge is doing the same at his new job. Hours after possibly Windhorst’s best two minutes ever on television, the Jazz traded Rudy Gobert to the Minnesota Timberwolves for four first round draft picks.
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So what’s going on with Jeanie Buss? Sending out cryptic tweets during silly season, why would she do that? Do we need to be paying attention to what’s going on with Buss? Do the Phoenix Suns and Brooklyn Nets need to find out what’s going on with Buss? Will Kyrie Irving and Joe Harris end up with the Lakers for Talen Horton-Tucker, Russell Westbrook and a 2027 first-round pick? Is she upset with the Los Angeles Lakers’ teamwork last season?
It’s also a possibility that she’s messing with us. She threw that out there on a Sunday night at 11 p.m. pacific time to rile up all the Lakers fans and when the Laker haters woke up it could add fuel to their beliefs that the Lakers are a tire fire with no relief in sight. That last one is the most unlikely, but whether she knows it or not, her tweet was quite the Jerry Jones move. When you own the most recognizable team in a professional league, anything you say about it generates a massive amount of attention.
That technique is how Jones made the Dallas Cowboys the most valuable sports franchise in the world. They haven’t played in an NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season, but while a First Take A-Block topic in September could be about the Cowboys, it could also be about them in March or May. If winning the big one isn’t in sight, put on a show, and always be accessible for a quote.
Buss has something that the Cowboys do not have, she owns the winningest franchise in major American professional sports since they were widely integrated. Of their 27 World Series championships the Yankees won their 10th literally the year Jackie Robinson entered the MLB. Since MLB peaked in the 1970s with 20 percent of its players being Black, the Yankees have won seven. Of the Lakers 13 championships they’ve won in Los Angeles 12 came after the ABA/NBA merger, and six since the turn of the millennium. The Cowboys were closest most recently to a Super Bowl when a ball moved in Dez Bryant’s arms in 2014.
They’ve still got the celebrities on the sidelines and now they have the Crypto company name on their stadium instead of the place where people buy office supplies and use printers on the rare occasion that they need one.
She’s already got the documentary celebrating the franchise’s lore, Buss needs to ramp up keeping the Lakers on peoples’ minds. Maybe she threw shade on Sunday at LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and Russell Westbrook, maybe at her front office, or maybe she just misses Bryant. Regardless, with Irving to Lakers trending, her tweet did massive numbers on a holiday weekend and she’s not a big social media personality.
So what’s going on with Jeanie Buss? I don’t know, and she clearly hasn’t found her Danny Ainge to turn her franchise around. But this placing the wick of this tweet in the social media fire for it to explode is good business. She should keep it up.
