Written by Bill Plaschke at LA Times.com
This is exactly what the Clippers needed.
This is exactly what the Lakers dreaded.
This is a move filled with Clippers’ credibility and hope.
This is move full of Lakers’ embarrassment and dread.
In the 34 years these two teams have shared a city, never before have they shared a transaction that has felt so utterly transformational.
Jerry West, arguably the most important Laker in franchise history, is going to work for the Clippers.
Say it loud. It sounds crazy. Tell it to your friends. They won’t believe it. But league officials confirmed Wednesday that West is finalizing a deal to make it absolutely true.
The man who has seven Lakers championship rings, including one as a player, is walking down the Staples Center hallway to join a team that has languished in the shadow of those rings.
The man who built two Lakers title dynasties has agreed to work as an advisor to the team that those dynasties used to dominate.
Lakers fans used to laugh at the Clippers. Many of those laughs are now surely turning to cries of frustation at the organization that let him get away.
West, 79, will be leaving his job as an executive board member of the NBA champion Golden State Warriors and joining the Clippers in a similar position as soon as next week.
But the real story is, he wanted to serve a similar role with the Lakers, yet they never asked him. He wanted to leave the Warriors and end his career with his eternal home team, but he says he was told there was no room.
“Sometimes I thought in my life that maybe that might be something that I can revisit, or they would want me to revisit, but that didn’t happen,” West said recently when asked about his Lakers tenure on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “It kind of sent me a message that they wanted to go elsewhere, which was fine.”
When Jeanie Buss engineered the Lakers’ front-office shakeup in February, ousting her brother Jim and Mitch Kupchak, she could have replaced them with a combination of the venerable West and a smart young general manager.
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