Dear Jim Buss,

I've been an active fan of the Lakers since 1975. I've seen the good times, and the not so good times. Which in and of itself is kind of amazing. Unlike every other major NBA franchise I can think of, Boston included, we Lakers fans have had for the past three decades almost none of what could legitimately be considered "bad times." There are some overwrought and overly emotional fans who could argue, but they're wrong, and I don't care about them anyway. The point is, we Lakers fans have had good times and not so good times and very, very few actually bad times. The early post-Showtime years were pretty much the only years of the bad, and they turned out to be actual rebuilding years, including the birth in 1996 of the Shaq/Kobe duopoly. And there's a reason for this. For the past 30 years, that reason has been the Lakers owner, your dad, Jerry Buss.

Jerry Buss has not only been unwilling to field a losing team, he has been unwilling to settle for a team that does not have a fighting chance to contend for an NBA championship. There's also a reason for this. As poker pros say when conferring the highest compliment on a player, "he's got gamble." At the poker table, Jerry is known to be a very snug player, hyper-aggressive when he has an edge, and very conservative when he doesn't. As an owner though, Jerry augments that knowledge of when he's got an edge with the gift of gamble. And thank God he does. People forget how much heat he took for major moves like trading Vlade Divac to the Hornets for the rights to Kobe Bryant in the '96 draft. And again, many of the same hoarse voices called for his head when he traded Shaq to Orlando in '04 and stuck with Kobe. I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life, and this town has been lit by Jerry's gamble with a championship trophy on average every third year since he bought the team in 1979. And because of his actual commitment to excellence (as opposed to the empty credo of a certain former and temporary local sports franchise) he has trained his organization, his coaches, his players, his fans, and this city, to accept nothing else. That's why we don't hang conference banners in Staples Center. It's win or nothing.

But here we are now, and it's February 10, 2012, over a year and a half out from a Laker last hoisting the Larry O'Brien trophy, and I'm watching Kobe Bryant standing with the ball at the top of the key, looking for someone to pass it to. His choices are Jason Kapono, Josh McRoberts, Andrew Goudelock, and Troy Murphy, while we're getting ass-whupped by a New York Knicks squad missing its top two stars while being led by an previously unheralded and unsigned rookie sensation. Okay, so it's the night after we outlasted a Boston team on their court in overtime and it might be factored in as a schedule loss. But that's Kobe Bryant out there, healthy, spry, current league scoring leader, if not the greatest baller of all time, then in the discussion for second best. Goudelock's showing some signs of possible future greatness in his rookie season, but come on. This is really our Lakers? Wait a sec, let's review. Okay, we got Kobe. We got the once great but now almost toothless old family dog, Derek Fisher, the majorly talented and very tall yet perpetually self-satisfied and still immature Andrew Bynum, the extremely capable if wounded, soft-handed Euro stylist Pau Gasol, the empty husk of what used to be Ron Artest, and a bunch of journeymen scraps. Wow. That's really it, and everyone's healthy. I know we're in year one APJ, we're in a shortened season, and Mike Brown seems to be a decent coach at least on the defensive end, but come on. It's over a third of the way through the season and the Lakers are 4-10 on the road and could conceivably not make the playoffs. What the hell happened?

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