Swanson: LeBron James says he doesn’t care about the drama, neither should we

INGLEWOOD – Agreed, LeBron. I don’t care, either.

Buckling in for a Lakers season is like being on that ride at the theme park that breaks down constantly. One minute you’re like, “Wheee!,” and the next you’re dangling awkwardly while you wait for the maintenance crew to deal with the same issues that are always interrupting.

It’s not precarious at this point, not even a story worth telling when you get home. It’s just sharing an exasperated here-we-go-again sigh with the guy next to you while you wait for the recurrent discourse about the dysfunctional Buss family to die down, as if you didn’t already know. As if you’re not an Angeleno who was born knowing.

If you’re a Laker fan, your lot in life is that you’ve had to revisit this topic again and again before returning to your regularly scheduled roller coaster on the court – like Thursday’s 112-104 loss to the Clippers at the Intuit Dome.

In this one, the Lakers nonchalantly dug a 26-point hole but cared enough in the second half to chop down the deficit to 93-91, on a one-footed fadeaway 3-pointer from Luka Doncic. In the end, the home team sent away all the Lakers’ fans to chew on a sixth loss in nine games – and the latest report, fueled of course by unnamed sources, about the messy inner workings of the Buss family that for so long owned and operated the franchise.

My hot take here: If you’re going to have a hot take, stand on business.

If you really just need to get something off your chest, say it with your whole chest.

Generally, NBA coverage reads too much like an internet message board, from the most innocuous to the most incendiary bits of perspective. Sources are not anonymous posters in their moms’ basements, but they might as well be.

So in ESPN’s 7,400-word piece about the sale of the Lakers’ sale to Mark Walter and the subsequent firing of the Buss family members beside Governor Jeanie Buss, we get lots of information about private conversations between siblings, and we get siblings declining to comment for the article, which also fills us in on the mean things Jeanie is said to have done.

Including, apparently, underappreciating LeBron James, who stood before the usual throng of reporters after Thursday’s loss addressing the scuttlebutt gumming up the works this time. It was as if he couldn’t emphasize it enough: “I don’t really care.”

“This is my eighth year here,” he said, “I’ve been in the league 23 years, there’s gonna be another article tomorrow.

“Quite frankly, I don’t really care about articles. I really don’t. I don’t care about stories. I don’t care about podcasts and all that type of [stuff]. They don’t bother me. I’m 41 years old and I watch golf every day…

“I don’t care.”

But in terms of his partnership with Jeanie, he gave his best passive-aggressive retort: “I thought it was good. But somebody could see it another way.”

We can quibble with the Lakers’ inaction in the LeBron era. We can criticize general manager Rob Pelinka for being too precious with draft picks and too afraid to pull the trigger on a trade unless he’s absolutely sure it’s a slam dunk. We can call out the front office for letting Alex Caruso get away and roll our eyes at the Russell Westbrook experience that set them back so much.

But we also should acknowledge that the Lakers have always had a North Star — which is to do right by their superstars. And we can’t say they haven’t given LeBron that treatment. That he hasn’t been paid and celebrated. I mean, L.A. would have thrown a parade, but COVID rained on that.

As LeBron spoke Thursday, his son, Bronny James, the Lakers’ seldom-used second-year guard, sat at his locker across the room, looking on.

And just a few minutes before that, JJ Redick, the Lakers’ second-year coach and LeBron’s first “Mind the Game” podcast partner, sought to excuse Thursday’s debilitating early game lull: “Guys are worried about their futures, and that’s what happens when you got a team full of free agents and player options. I think it’s just natural that you’re going to worry about the offense, and I’ve been there… that’s a human thing. It’s not anybody’s fault.”

It’s also a human thing to believe what we want to. But just because someone tells us how he believes someone else to feel doesn’t make it true. It might, of course. It could. But to quote LeBron, “somebody could see it another way.”

Here’s the thing — I don’t care.

What I care about is how Walters and his team are going to fortify the Lakers’ scouting department from which younger brothers Jesse and Joey Buss were let go. How new ownership can Dodgerfy a basketball team whose construction will be complicated by the NBA’s onerous salary cap.

I care about how fast and hopefully fluid the Lakers’ roller coaster will run without palace intrigue causing intermittent snags along the way.

And whether the organization will operate at a sufficiently high level so that the people pulling the levers will actually want those moves attributed to them.