Bob Iger is about to become the new face of Lakers ownership. Lakers fans just found out he’s been rooting for the wrong team in LA for the last 25 years.
Iger and businessman Joshua Kushner are buying the Lakers from Mark Walter for a record-shattering $12.5 billion. The ink is barely dry on that news and social media has already dug up a 2021 podcast clip that has Lakers fans holding their breath.
On JJ Redick and Tommy Alter’s “The Old Man and the Three” podcast, Iger openly explained why he became a Clippers fan when he moved to Los Angeles from New York in 2000.
“I’m a Clippers fan. Having moved from New York to Los Angeles back in 2000 and being a big NBA fan, I needed a team to root for,” Iger said on the show. “Lakers were a big rival of the Knicks, the team I grew up rooting for. So I couldn’t root for the Lakers very easily, just was not in my DNA.”
That did not age well.
Photos also resurfaced of Iger sitting courtside at Clippers games right next to owner Steve Ballmer. So this wasn’t a casual fandom. Iger was in the front row at Clippers games while a Lakers ownership pitch was building behind the scenes.
None of this is a real problem for the Lakers organization. Iger is 75 years old with deep NBA relationships. He was instrumental in helping the league pull off the 2020 bubble in Orlando during the pandemic and has been linked to potential ownership pursuits of Western Conference teams in the past. The man knows basketball.
But optics matter, and for a fanbase that already just watched the Buss family sell to Mark Walter and then Walter flip the team a year later, this feels like another gut punch. Lakers fans want an owner who bleeds purple and gold, not one who spent two decades cheering the guys across the hallway at Crypto.com Arena.
The Lakers deal is technically not done. It still needs approval from the NBA Board of Governors. That process took nine months when Walter bought in from the Buss family, so we’re probably not seeing final approval until well into the 2026-27 season.
Luka Doncic, who now has five different owners in his last four years across Dallas and Los Angeles, will still be under contract and running the show on the court. And Magic Johnson has already given the incoming ownership group his stamp of approval, saying he has known Iger personally for 40 years.
So the Lakers get their new billionaire owner. Iger gets a franchise valued at $12.5 billion. And Clippers fans get one more reason to feel a little bitter about their place in the Los Angeles basketball pecking order.
The purple and gold will keep spinning regardless. But Iger has some work to do to convince Lakers fans he really is one of them now.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
