There’s no question that the Dodgers’ approach to baseball has been successful. Under Mark Walter, the team has morphed into a dynasty.
It made sense, then, to try to replicate that approach with the Lakers once he took charge. However, it wasn’t exactly a smooth process attempting to do so.
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 Dan Woike of The Athletic, was some Lakers staffers being
rubbed the wrong way by the Dodgers’ staffers.
Still, multiple sources in different departments expressed optimism about the direction of the franchise under Iger and Kushner. Some felt the Dodgers’ 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’t upset to see a pathway for new management to come in, even if it’s a bit of a mystery and doesn’t have the track record of the Dodgers’ success.
Skepticism about whether the Dodgers’ analytics-heavy approach would work in the NBA is understandable. In baseball, every event is isolated, making it easier to manipulate or exploit.
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.
At the same time, the Lakers’ front office is full of people who have mostly done things one type of way for a long time. Change isn’t hard and isn’t always well-received, even with the best of intentions.
Having said all that, it also feels entirely possible that the Dodgers, knowing that they’ve had success and the Lakers largely haven’t, could have come in with a sense of superiority. Deserved or not, it could have led to a rocky relationship between the two sides.
It’s really impossible to tell which of these options, or combinations of them, is the truth. For better or worse, the truth won’t matter much anymore either.
You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude or on Bluesky at @jacobrude.bsky.social.
