PART 1: Lakers games are going to look and sound very different this year and moving forward

0:00Oh boy, he always seems to get involved. I'm telling you, too many coconuts are hitting him right on top of the skull. I think Anthony will be a great acquisition. I think we can do it all. Every who shows us. And we're live. Welcome everybody here to the Lakers Lounge podcast. I'm Anthony Erwin, senior Lakers Insider as well as lead Lakers content creator for Offside joined on this fine Wednesday afternoon by you guys. Today on the show, it is our weekly mail bag, mail bag episode, obviously done a little

1:00bit later on the week than usual because of the holiday earlier this week and because we had Harrison yesterday. And so here we are. Today on the show, we're going to be talking about, I've already gotten one iTunes question or iTunes review question who was asking about a game presentation. I also wanted to really quickly address very quietly, Don Van Not a junior who was one of the writers of that infamous Clippers article. He gave a statement to Puck, a kind of an internet on Bootsman type of article or platform about that story and kind of defended the reporting that was done in it and the way that it was presented and really kind of fired back at the notion that ESPN operates as a corporate PR arm for certain outlets, teams, personnel owners, whatever.

2:04So we'll talk a little bit about that if you guys are interested in it. And then really for the most part, I have to go pick up my daughter in about an hour or so. So in that time, you guys can ask me about anything that you guys want and I will answer as many questions as I can possibly answer between now and when I have to go out and pick up every from school. So that'll be kind of the premise and basis of this here episode. Please hit that like button, please hit that subscribe button. Comment, like, share, all of that good stuff. This show is brought to you here on YouTube by price picks, use that promo code HMA and get $150 worth of free price pick selections. When you sign up, use that code and win a $5 lineup of your own. Happy NFL season, by the way, kicks off a little bit later tonight looking forward to that game. We are also obviously available in podcast form. Please subscribe wherever it is that you get those podcasts preferably on Odyssey, but

3:07anywhere that you get them is perfectly fine by me. And yeah, let's go ahead and dive on in starting with the Lakers game presentation, which starting this year and then certainly over the next couple of years is going to start looking and sounding very, very different. The weight is over. Football is here and so is draft Kings. draft Kings is now live in all 50 states. One app, every sports nationwide, new draft Kings customers sign up with code 2400, spend five bucks to get $200 in rewards within 21 days includes all markets. That's code 2400 in partnership with draft Kings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem called 1-800-Gamber, 1-800-My reset, Connecticut called 888-878-97777 or visit ccpg.org on behalf of boot hill casino in Kansas. Bettax passed through may apply in Illinois, 21 and over, void in Canada. Bet with draft Kings sportsbook to get bonus bets that expire in seven days or trade with draft Kings predictions to get predictions dollars that expire in one year.

4:09Event contract trading involves risk of loss. Predictions offer void in New York. Nonwithdrawable rewards issued as $50 click to claims every seven days for 21 days. Terms at DKNG.co slash offer, limited time offer, nationwide based on sportsbook predictions and free-to-play sports contest availability varies by state. So first and foremost, here's what we know. What we definitely know is that Lawrence Tanner has opted for retirement and will no longer be the Lakers public address announcer there in the arena. He was the guy who had those dulcet tones and two minutes left. That kind of stuff called out travels and calls and substitutions and stuff. So if you're going to a game, we know that that is going to sound different. I haven't heard or frankly really looked into who his replacement is going to be. What kind of complicates who that replacement might be is that we don't know who's calling

5:10the shots. Like, the Lakers have or the league has governor's board meetings next week, I believe. And we don't know who the Lakers are going to be sending. And why that matters is because when Mark Walter was primary owner of the Lakers in terms of percentage shares that were owned, when he was the owner, he had Lon Rosen going in and firing everybody. Lon Rosen was making huge sweeping and frankly unpopular changes to the non-basketball side of the organization. One such change is that he, I'm told, wanted to modernize the way that the Lakers games sounded. He was really kind of pretty recklessly just going in there and making a bunch of changes.

6:13We already saw that Mike Trudell, who used to write the Lakers schedule breakdown for NBA.com and for Lakers.com, he no longer does that. All of Lakers' digital basically was just completely wrecked by some of those decisions. And then because of the wishy-washy nature of Lakers ownership over the last couple of the years, a lot of those positions have remained unfilled and a lot of that content has suffered as a result of it. You look at the Lakers Twitter account and it is still very bare bones and there isn't really like a consistent voice or theme to those tweets and stuff like that and social media posts. So everybody right now in the organization is all kind of looking around at each other, going like, they're already a thin group as it is that is asked frequently to wear several

7:19hats. And with it being just gutted to the extent that Lakers' digital has been gutted since Mark Walter bought the team and since Lon Rosen started gutting all of those things. And now that those positions have remained unfilled, you're looking at an already bare bones Lakers' digital operation that is now all the thinner. So and then on top of that, what I had heard under Mark Walter was that the plan was for a Billy Mac in stew to basically look at this season as their retirement tour in the booth. Might even see them part-time in the booth as the Lakers try out their replacements live on the air. There is going to be other changes to Lakers broadcasts that you're going to be doing to feel as well that I can't quite get into right now. But yeah, the Lakers are going to look and sound in terms of their game presentation, whether

8:25that's in the arena or watching on TV. That's going to be very, very different next year. And some of those changes we might enjoy. Some of them we're going to be kind of blindsided by and wonder why we are getting those changes. Yeah, it's kind of a mess. Like spectrum is kind of in flux right now with some of the hosts who do or do not have jobs or don't know what they have jobs and they have. At the end of last year we had seen a real kind of adjustment towards former players being presented in post game and pre game duties, whereas before you would have somebody like Mike Breznahan as a regular part of those things. That's another change that I've heard some rumblings about. His role at spectrum, having changed significantly as well.

9:26So yeah, we'll kind of have to just wait and see what this is actually going to look like and what makes all of this even more complicated is that in the matter of 14, 15, 16 months or whatever it's been, you've had the prior leadership under Jeanne Bus and she was somebody who was very comfortable in maintaining the status quo with Laker's presentation. She wanted to abide a lot of the traditions that her dad had outlined to her and to her siblings. So not much was really changing anytime soon with that stuff. Then you had a Mark Walter sale and obviously Lon Rosen comes in and changes everything that he can. Then you have the sale from Mark Walter to Bob Eiger and Josh Kushner and they don't really know right now who was going to be representing the Lakers at the Governor Board

10:28of Governors meetings next week and it's just kind of a mess. So like nobody really knows how this is going to look. By the way, the first preseason game is less than a month away. Like I know that I kind of freak out a little bit about like, hey, you guys still have some adjustments to the roster that you actually have to make before we get to the preseason and training camp and that stuff. But a lot of this, like what the Lakers are going to look and sound like, kind of want that ironed out a little bit before, you know, the weeks prior to these games actually getting underway. So I would imagine we're going to find out more definitively on a lot of these fronts in short order. I would hope so at least, but I would expect, you know, and I would warn those of you who are watching, Lakers are going to look and sound very, very different next year. So we'll see and like, look, I see people saying that it's going to be Kushner who is going

11:34to be representing the Lakers. Maybe the thing is, Iger and Kushner, Iger specifically had said that so long as Jeannie and her family maintained enough percentage ownership in the Lakers that they would abide the prior agreement between Jeannie and Mark Walter, where Jeannie would remain the governor for the next five years, you know, at the time of their striking ideal, which, you know, we'd gone through one year of already. We have four more years of that left if this continues. The big shakeup obviously is that the other bus siblings sold the Lakers to Iger and Kushner out from under Jeannie, but that is now being held up in court by way of the documents that Jeannie and her lawyers have already filed. And by the way, that original court date, which was going to be in early November, that's

12:38already been pushed back to December now. And again, you have board of governors meetings next week, which I don't know who is going to be representing the Lakers at those meetings. If you're Jeannie, do you want to maintain a strong face and go and try to represent the Lakers there as you fight to maintain that governorship in the courts? If you're Iger or Kushner, do you talk to Silver and be like, we got to get some kind of clarity on this before the season starts, right? Right? Right? Drink up, baby. Fantasy football happy hour is here to get you wins and have some laughs. Matthew Berry here and my podcast, Fantasy Football Happy Hour, has the Sleepers bus and start-sit advice you need to win your league. We're diving into the tape. We're crunching the numbers to bring you sleepers. Weakly start-sit advice whether you're defending a title or desperately avoiding last place. I've got you covered every single weekday. The bar is open.

13:39It's Fantasy Football Happy Hour with Matthew Berry, wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know how this is going to go. So you know, this is just one of several things that are all kind of held up right now by way of Jeannie and her siblings squabbling over the 15 percentage points that are 15 to 17 or whatever the official number is that they previously owned and then tried to sell to Iger and Kushner. And once we get some clarity there, I guess maybe we'll get a little bit more clarity on some of these decisions, whether it's basketball facing, whether it's basketball presentation, whether it's business decisions and stuff like that. I guess we just have to wait and see. I mean, the sale isn't even official yet, right? It's supposed to be voted on at these Board of Governor meetings next week. And then at that time, if Iger and Kushner are, you know, voted in, which the expectation

14:42I would assume is going to be the case, like that they will be voted in, at that time will be get more, like I would imagine that will be the first opportunity for us to get some clarity on what these agreements are going to be because those other governors, these other owners of these other teams are going to want to know who's calling shots when it comes time to call y'all for trades who has final say on this stuff. So yeah, it's a bit of a mess, but I do think that the Lakers are going to look and sound incredibly different next year. And then certainly in the years to come, I would be pretty kind of surprised if Billy Mack and Stu Lance were the play by play and color commentator for the Lakers games after this season. All right, let's go ahead and dive into another kind of ambiguous response to a weird story.

15:42And that is ESPN. Now remember, ESPN releases an article that was written by Don Van Aute, Jr. Backster Homes, Ramona Shelburn, and originally Shams Korania. Shams was on, he was in the tweet that Backster Homes sent when they released that article and it looks like ESPN removed Shams' byline from that article, right? So obviously what happens right after that article, which the headline was something along the lines of NBA finds no evidence of capture convention by the Clippers and they were, you know, the article went through links and links and links to explain why the Clippers were getting ready to get off Scotch free.

16:43The NBA then immediately releases a statement, refuting a lot of that article, Mike Bass, in typical Mike Bass fashion said, go bleep yourselves, that's not what's going on here unofficially. And then obviously we come to find out that the league comes down really, really hard on the Clippers, docking them five first round picks, finding them $30 million, suspending Steve Balmer a year, suspending Lawrence Frank six months and he only got that suspension because he cooperated with the investigation as well as the other executive who also got either a year or two years suspension from her duties with the Clippers as well. And so yeah, what you have now is a lot of people calling out ESPN wondering like what the hell is going on? How do you release an article that you admit in the article contains zero feedback or input

17:52from the NBA and was only told from the Clippers standpoint. Several other media outlets have since, you know, traditional media outlets have pointed out some of the conflicts of interest at play there have called into question the integrity of that article and of the journalist behind that article and ESPN has remained very, very quiet zero editorial feedback from ESPN officially on that article. And the, this, Orrin Puck is, is, or John Orrin who writes four Puck, which is a newsletter about kind of the media industry, received an email from Don Van Nouda, Jr. one of the again writers of that article. And in that email received to this point, what is the only official or even pseudo official

18:59statement from ESPN or anyone from ESPN on the matter. So I'll start with, let's see. All right. He writes, I'm not going to read the whole whole thing, but still I'll read a chunk of it. Quote, given the sensitive and impactful nature of the topics we explore and investigate, we understand the scrutiny that comes with our reporting. That's why we take such care, scrutinizing ourselves throughout a multi layer process involving experienced editors, reporters and leadership leadership was capitalized for some reason. For this particular story and the most important test in our view is how our August 17 story holds up against the findings ultimately released in the Wachtel report more than two weeks later. Accuracy is critical and we hold ourselves to the highest standard. We believe readers who judge the facts of our August 17 story against the specifics released

19:59in the report two weeks later will see that we accurately reflected the status and direction of the NBA's investigation at the time of publishing. And so that is where we're starting to get a sense of the spin or the defense of that article was, well, that's what we knew at the time. And to that point, I would just ask a relatively straightforward follow up, which is, hi, yeah, Don, yeah, one quick sec. Had you taken more time and say, I don't know, gotten input from the NBA on this story or for the story, do you think by the time in, you know, in that gap, that two week gap between your article and when the NBA officially punished the clippers that you could have maybe written a different version of this, a more updated version of this, a more balanced even version of this that would have actually more accurately reflected the actual outcome

21:02to the article, not the outcome or the outcome that you foresaw at the time of that article. And this is a thing and look, to the, to the meager extent that I do reporting here, I always try to say that, you know, like, for example, I'm sure I'm going to get questions over the course of this episode about what I think is going to happen with the Lakers roster from here until training camp. And then, you know, by the time we get to the NBA season, when it has to be trimmed down from the 16 guaranteed contracts that it currently has to the 15 guaranteed contracts that it can legally carry going into the season. And I will say whenever I, I, I do any kind of reporting that this is what I know as of right now and things are going to change between now and when the Lakers finally pull

22:03the trigger on whatever move that they're getting ready to do. And now I would also point out that what the Lakers are thinking about doing with Jaden Hardy or Dalton Connect or Bronny James or whoever they wind up cutting or trading to get down to that 15 number, what like that holds that, that, when it comes to importance, compared to ESPN reporting the direction of one of the most important cases in, in recent NBA history, that kind of pales in comparison. The other thing I would also point out is when you have a platform like ESPN and Donben at Donben, not a road, you know, kind of touched on this at the beginning of a statement, when you have a platform as large as ESPN that is looked at or was previously looked at carried the reputation previously of the height of sports reporting, I or journalism,

23:14whatever you want to call it, when you have a platform that is placed on the pedestal or has placed itself on that pedestal, there's a lot more writing on what these people reported than Joe Blowblogger over here, right? Now one day, I hope to arrive at a place where I am held to, and I try to hold myself to as high as standard as I can possibly be held to, but it is different when it is, like this guy says, an army of editors, allegedly leadership with a capital L, and three, I think four, reporters who all have their own sourcing, right? And so this whole notion of, well, see, this is what we wrote at the time, and that's what we thought was true at the time. Well, yeah, but the thing about accurate journalism is it's supposed to stand the test

24:18of time. Bye everyone.