The Lakers look set to finally start flexing their new financial muscle.
While a salary cap will limit how much new owner Mark Walter can spend on players, there is no salary cap on front-office hires.
After radio silence on the Lakers making any moves in that regard, it sounds like the team is set to finally start beefing up the franchise off the court.
On Friday, Dan Woike of The Athletic reported that the Lakers plan to begin building their new-look front office, modeled after the Dodgers.
The summer presents an opportunity, armed with significant cap flexibility, to start building the necessary components of a modern front office and reap early benefits. League sources say that includes significant hires to a wide range of front-office positions this summer, with the Lakers expected to model their front office after the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers.
“It’s going to be scary,” one rival executive said when asked about the potential of the fully built-out front office the Lakers are expected to assemble.
In the aftermath of Walter’s hiring, our own Bryan Toporek wrote about this very topic and detailed just how far behind the curve the Lakers were.
Citing a publicly available media guide, Vorkunov noted the Lakers have only 56 employees in their basketball operations department. The Oklahoma City Thunder, who are one win away from this year’s NBA championship, have 88, while the New York Knicks, who advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals this year for the first time in a quarter-century, have 92.
That number also came before the Lakers cleaned house in their scouting report. The firing of Joey and Jesse Buss largely overshadowed the fact that the majority of the scouting department was let go with them. That said, an overhaul of the scouting department was likely to come, as it’s one of the most obvious and easiest areas to spend money.
Going nearly hand in hand with that would be an improved analytics department. Those are two of the most commonly-discussed areas where the Lakers have been behind the eight ball.
It will be interesting to see if any decision-makers are added to the front office, too. Rob Pelinka is the President of Basketball Operations — for now — but will Walter hire more people in the front office and perhaps a general manager under him to add more voices to the room?
An interesting line from Woike in all of this is that the team will model the Dodgers front office. Right now, modeling just about anything they can from the Dodgers seems like the right call. Perhaps the Lakers can look into the deferred payment options as well.
How the Lakers build out the front office and how many people they hire will certainly be something to monitor now and into the coming months, particularly as an enormous summer and offseason await them.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
