Jim Buss is right about 1 thing in his Lakers’ self-defense

Lakers boss Jim Buss tried (in vain) to defend his reign to USA Today’s Sam Amick in a deep, wide-ranging conversation. As I implied in Tuesday’s NBA newsletter (to which you can subscribe), it doesn’t fly.

Buss complains about being treated unfairly by the media and by non-Lakers fans, while attempting to retroactively take credit for L.A.‘s successes from 2000 through 2010, and chalking up recent downturns to bad luck. Does anyone buy this? Does anyone buy that Jim Buss is the rare human who declines credit for success, who prefers to hang in the background while his father’s family business excels? It’s possible, but not plausible, given what we’ve seen of Buss since he took over the club.

There’s also the matter of Buss making himself look less than credible in Amick’s piece itself. To wit: Buss and his sister Jeanie still don’t agree on the deadline by which the Lakers must be competitive or else Jeanie takes over! Jeanie claims that the deadline is 2017, and that’s what it’s always been.

Jim says that once 2017 arrives, he has another offseason plus the following season to become competitive. Following 2017-18, if at that point the Lakers aren’t contending, he’ll step down. Needless to say, it doesn’t inspire confidence that in a piece all about how the Lakers have it together the two leading personalities can’t agree on this very important item.

But Buss does get something right in his self-defense, even if only accidentally and tangentially. It is the acknowledgement that the Lakers are no longer special.

When Buss speaks about the rebuilding process, he talks about the young players on the roster like D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle. He acknowledges and, according to Amick, even mocks the Lakers’ own recent pitches to top-tier free agents. This is important. The failed attempts to woo top talent over the last few summers speak to life in a capped-salary environment. They speak to the death of the allure of playing in a Lakers jersey or playing with an aging superstar.

Buss seems to have realized that the Lakers need a few new homegrown stars before being able to convince an outsider to sign on. In stating as much, Buss acknowledges that Lakers exceptionalism is dead. There are no shortcuts anymore.

This is a powerful realization. The problem is that it is not clear Jeanie Buss or the legions of the loudest fans believe it. What level of contention the Lakers must meet to keep Jim in power in 2017 or 2018 hasn’t been defined, but nothing indicates Jeanie means anything less than title contention.

For the Lakers over the course of their history, this is the normal expectation. But to expect any team to go from the bottom to contention in a few years these days is a big thing to ask. It happens thanks to force-of-nature players, good strategy and brilliant luck. You can do everything right and still not get there.

Buss has made things far more difficult for himself, too, by trading picks for Steve Nash and soaking up tens of millions of dollars in cap space for Kobe Bryant. The Lakers will lose their 2016 first-round pick unless they are both incredibly bad and incredibly lucky. (The Sixers claim it unless it lands in the top three. This is a relic of the Nash trade.)

Buss indicates that he believes the Lakers can land the free agent of their dreams in 2016, and they’ll have plenty of cap space to dole out, upwards of $60 million if Kobe retires. But it’s overly optimistic to think that the new Lakers core will have already developed to the point at which a top free agent thinks they are one player from contention.

Russell and Randle are essentially rookies. These things tend to take time. And developing quickly may be especially difficult for Russell given the Lakers’ backlog of guards with far more experience. (The coach running this experiment is saying the right things of late, but he still doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Byron Scott was, by the way, a Jim Buss hire.)

But at least Buss realizes that the Lakers now must act like every other team, that the mere whiff of Lakerdom won’t draw the Carmelo Anthonys and LaMarcus Aldridges and Kevin Loves and Kevin Durants and Russell Westbrooks to Los Angeles.

Acknowledgment is the first step. He actually hasn’t done a thing to indicate he knows what to do from here -- with the exception of his contributions to all those title teams, I guess -- but at least he acknowledges that the Lakers have work to do.

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