The Lakers Look More Like The Country Club Than Showtime [Op-Ed]

Source: Luke Hales / Getty

You expect certain things when you turn on a Los Angeles Lakers game. Purple and gold. Championship banners. Hollywood celebrities sitting courtside pretending they know what’s happening. And Black excellence, because for generations, some of the greatest players in NBA history have helped make the Lakers the Lakers.

What you might not expect is the House that Magic built to look like a country-club starting five. 

Welcome to the new Lakers, where Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves, and Walker Kessler are expected to fill three starting spots, and head coach JJ Redick has already had to assure people the team won’t roll out an all-white starting five. Apparently, even Redick knows how that looks.

Let’s be clear. Nobody is arguing that white players shouldn’t play basketball. That’s an antiquated belief, especially since we’ve all seen some of the greatest white players with the best nicknames, including “The Hick from French Lick,” “Big Country,” “White Mamba,” and “White Chocolate.”

But pretending that race, history, and power have nothing to do with the optics of this particular moment requires a level of willful amnesia that would make a Republican senator blush. The Lakers aren’t just another basketball franchise. They are a cultural institution that was built, in no small part, by Black superstars.

Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar helped define Showtime. Kobe Bryant became a global icon. Shaquille O’Neal turned dominance into entertainment. And LeBron James did something during his time there, but I’m still trying to figure out what it was. 

These players didn’t just play in Los Angeles; they helped turn the Lakers into a billion-dollar cultural phenomenon. Now, as the franchise enters another ownership transition, the basketball product looks conspicuously different.

Billionaire Mark Walter acquired a majority stake in the team in 2025. In August, former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner (yep, the brother of Jared Kushner) agreed to buy the franchise at a reported $12.5 billion valuation, pending the necessary approvals. The Los Angeles Times reported on the latest ownership shake-up.

No evidence suggests the new ownership changes were pushed to make the Lakers whiter, but let’s stop acting like the pearly whiteness of the Lakers roster exists in a bubble. The roster has basketball explanations, including a push to build around Dončić and Reaves. But the visual symbolism is difficult to ignore.

The Kushners wade in white nationalists’ water. They are a part of the whitening of America that has been the hallmark of the Trump administration. Jared Kushner is a White House liaison who goes on global negotiations despite being a private citizen. His brother, Joshua Kushner, claims to be a “lifelong democrat”  but there is no denying that he’s in bed with the Trump administration just like his brother. 

The lifelong Democrat also happens to be a venture capitalist who backed a weapons-and-AI company called Anduril Industries. Can you guess who the Trump administration recently gave a defense contract worth up to $20 billion? Yep, you guessed it. Anduril Industries. 

So miss me with that lifelong democratic mess. 

Black players helped build the NBA into the entertainment juggernaut that billionaires now pay record-setting sums to own. Yet the people writing the checks, making the decisions, and determining the future of these institutions have historically been overwhelmingly white.

Funny how Black excellence can be the product, the marketing strategy and the reason people buy the merchandise, while ownership remains an entirely different conversation.

And this is bigger than basketball. 

We live in a country where Black culture is endlessly consumed, borrowed, repackaged, and sold, often by people who have never had to experience the realities of being Black. The culture is profitable. The people who create it? Well, their value can become considerably more complicated when the conversation shifts from entertainment to power.

Again, nobody needs to apologize for being white and good at basketball. But Lakers fans can notice what they’re seeing. And they’re allowed to ask what happens when the franchise’s identity changes alongside its ownership.

The Lakers may eventually win another championship with this roster. If they do, nobody will care what color the starting five is wearing beneath those purple-and-gold jerseys.

But until then, forgive us for noticing that the house built by Black basketball royalty is looking increasingly like a very expensive place where Black people are expected to provide the entertainment.

And somewhere, the ghost of Showtime is asking who invited all these folks to the cookout.

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