It hasn’t been a quiet year for either NBA franchise in Los Angeles, and this week, both controversies—one involving the Lakers and the other the Clippers—happened to boil over at once.
A Family Feud Over the Lakers
The Lakers’ ownership saga has taken another twist. Back in June 2025, the Buss family agreed to sell majority ownership to LA Dodgers owner Mark Walter for a record $10 billion, ending nearly 45 years of family control that stretched back to Dr. Jerry Buss’s original 1979 purchase. Jeanie Buss stayed on as Governor, and the family kept a 17.8 percent minority stake.
That should have been the end of the story. Instead, Walter himself just sold a majority stake to Bob Iger and Jared Kushner for a record-breaking $12.5 billion, flipping the franchise again in just over a year—and that’s when things got messy. Jeanie Buss, the family’s controlling owner and CEO, is now opposing the sale of the family’s remaining stake to Iger and Kushner. Her attorney, Adam Streisand, says flatly that she “has not agreed to sell,” directly contradicting a family statement ESPN had reported claiming otherwise. Streisand has also accused Jeanie’s brothers Joey and Jesse of leaking false and defamatory information to the reporter who broke the original story.
The rest of the family—Joey, Jesse, Jim, Johnny, and Janie—are reportedly all in favor of the Lakers’ sale, leaving Jeanie isolated among her five siblings. The legal stakes are real: a 2017 court order requires the trust’s co-trustees to keep Jeanie elected as controlling owner every year during her lifetime, a role requiring at least a 15 percent stake, and Streisand argues any sale that undermines that would breach the trust and amount to contempt of court.
It wouldn’t be the first Buss family clash, either. Jeanie fired Jim as the Lakers’ head of basketball operations back in 2017, prompting a failed attempt to strip her board seat. Next, Joey and Jesse were themselves fired from front-office roles this past November. There’s also a financial clock ticking: a sale completed after October, the one-year anniversary of Walter’s purchase, could save Walter roughly $425 million in capital gains treatment. No lawsuit has been filed yet, but litigation looks increasingly likely without an outside resolution.
Crucially, all this is happening just as the Lakers are trying to build a championship-caliber supporting cast around new main man Luka Doncic.
A Salary Cap Scandal Chasing the Clippers
Across town, the Clippers are dealing with a scandal that’s already won a Pulitzer. Reporter Pablo Torre alleged that Kawhi Leonard received a four-year, $28 million endorsement deal from Aspiration, a now-defunct carbon offset company, shortly after re-signing with the Clippers in 2021—a deal Torre’s reporting suggested may have funneled money from owner Steve Ballmer, who personally invested $50 million in Aspiration while the Clippers separately signed a $300 million sponsorship deal with the company.
Leonard’s compensation from Aspiration reportedly totaled roughly $48 million once a separate $20 million side deal is included, and the story only grew from there with an additional undisclosed Daktronics sponsorship and leaked internal emails tying Leonard’s uncle to sponsorship coordination.
Ballmer has maintained he was “duped” by Aspiration’s founder and says he lost $60 million of his own money in the process. The NBA’s investigation is still ongoing, and this week brought conflicting reports—ESPN said investigators found no evidence Ballmer funneled money through sponsors, narrowing the probe to whether the team improperly introduced Leonard to business contacts, while the NBA disputed that characterization entirely.
Leonard’s agreed trade to the Toronto Raptors remains frozen because the Raptors would inherit any punishment, and Commissioner Adam Silver has said he wants the matter resolved before training camp. Investigators are now also examining whether the Clippers failed to properly supervise their own employees.
Two franchises, two very different kinds of chaos—one a family fight over who controls the checkbook, the other a scandal over whether the checkbook was used to break the rules. Neither looks close to resolved.
And that’s bad news for both the Lakers and Clippers.
