Locked On Lakers - Daily Podcast On The Los Angeles Lakers - As Lakers Face CRITICAL OFFSEASON, Rob Pelinka Will Remain IN CHARGE of Basketball Ops

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

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The Lakers are facing their most critical offseason in years, and Rob Polinka will be in charge. Is he ready to do the job? Is he capable of doing the job? That's next. You are Locked-on Lakers. Your daily Los Angeles Lakers podcast, part of the Locked-on Podcast Network, your team every day. Thanks to everybody for making Locked on Lakers first listen to every day, Monday through Friday, sometimes on weekends, even on holidays, and now more than once a day, no matter how where you get your, podcast, whether you're an Apple guy, Spotify guy, one of the 37,000 plus subscribers to Lockdown

Lakers YouTube channel, you're part of making the Lockdown Podcast Network, the number one sports podcast network anywhere you find podcasts. Brian Komenetsky with Andy Kemeniski, hosting this program. We've covered the Lakers for nearly 20 years with the LA Times and ESPN and the athletic and in all that time, Andy. A lot of the same people have wandered in and out of the Lakers orbit, including Lon Rosen, who went from the Lakers to the Dodgers and now is back with the Lakers as president of business operations. I think there's something like that. I'm butchering the right.

Oh, that is the exact title. It is. Nice. I nailed it. He recently hired to replace Tim Harris. Tim Harris, thank you. How soon we forget. Hired to replace Tim Harris.

spoke to the media ahead of Tuesday's loss to Orlando, of course. We covered that in full for the big show on Wednesday. Make sure you check out that episode. But Lon Rosen spoke to the media, and this from Dan Wakey of the Athletic, quoting his tweet, in a conversation with reporters, New Lakers, president of business operations,

Lon Rosen, says the plan is for Rob Polinka with input from Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zydy, to continue to handle basketball operations. Polinket told reporters the plan is to have an expanded front office this summer. So Andy, this means that the Lakers will be, in fact, trying to build out the front office using that likely that Dodgers model, which is why Andrew Friedman and Faran Ziety will be advising, and doing all that infrastructure build out while also navigating arguably the most

important offseason they've had in a decade. And Rob Polinka is going to be at the front of all of it. It is at least the most important offseason since either they landed LeBron or they landed Anthony Davis in that trade. They're both so connected you could consider part of maybe one long offseason and one long process of a build. But it is easily as important as any offseason since then.

And as I've pointed out before, with Luca Donchich in his prime and having taken a team to the finals, this is the first time the Lakers have had a superstar that has demonstrated he can take a team to the finals as the number one guy since Kobe in his prime.

And so you're going back 15, 20 years ago since the Lakers have been in this type of position. It is incredibly important. I know for a lot of Laker fans, the news that they wanted to hear is that Rob Polinka would not be the person in charge of this moving forward or that he would be still with the front office demoted answering to somebody else.

The odds of that happening were always pretty low, if for no other reason than if you were going to do it, frankly, you should have done it by now because you need to get started on the process of figuring out who you would interview for the job, putting out the feelers, like that sort of process. You don't want to be figuring that out, I don't know, maybe a month and a half before the most important off season inside. And this is what they told us they were going to do. Well, or less.

I don't know if it's what they're. Every signal, at least in my interpretation, every signal that they've put out has been leading to this sort of order of execution in terms of how this is going to be done, where Rob Polinka and Jeannie Bus would still be in their positions, and with a new, sort of a new mandate and a new directive. All I meant was a lot more money. All I meant was the difference between signals, which you are correct about versus reports or formal statements.

Tim Harris, you know, when we talked about Tim Harris, letting the staff know that this would be his last season, that was one quarter of Jeannie's inner circle. So with that happening, I could at least understand how some Laker fans, whether reading tea leaves or wish casting, could have thought maybe dramatic changes beyond that were on the horizon simply because Tim Harris

has had a big voice for a long time. But if they were going to get rid of Rob Palin, It's already overdue. What is most important to me, though, and we'll talk about this, is if Rob was going to stay, and this is something you and I had talked about in the aftermath of Lon Rosen being hired, Tim Harris being on the way out, just the general what comes next with the front office. Neither one of us thought that the odds of Polinka being replaced were particularly high. But what was really important to me is the front office needs to be buffed out. It needs to be more voices, more experiences, perspectives, particularly I think it's important, ones that were not specifically formed by your time either inside the walls in El Segundo

or closely related to things that are Lakers-centric. They've needed, frankly, just more manpower. Even if you think Rob Polinka is the most underappreciated, underrated exec in, forget just the NBA currently, like NBA history. It's too big of a job for a front office that has been as small as, frankly, Rob has wanted it. Well, that's the part that's interesting about it. And I've seen people talk about it, like, skeptical as whether or not Rob will do this, whether they'll, do the build out and all these other things. And they're going to.

Like there is no, I don't have a choice. He doesn't have a choice. And so that part of it is, you know, Polinka can can plausibly say that, you know, part of the reason they haven't had a large basketball operations department is because I wasn't given the flexibility and the money and all these other things to have a large basketball operations department.

The fact that that's also was in his best interests and served, him best with Jeannie in terms of his own job security and his own power is, I'm sure just coincidental in that regard. So, you know, he's never been asked to do the thing that he's never really wanted to do. Now he does. Now he has the chance to do. And so after the break, we'll take a quick break here, but I'll get to a couple things that I think are, really challenging, both exciting in any other year, but really challenging and potentially problematic for this one. And we'll get through it next.

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But one is going to be considerably more noticeable in the short term. And that is what can you do with this roster in the offseason? We talked at length on Tuesday's big show about Austin Reeves and his future. We're not done talking about that. I got tons of great feedback on that show. I spent a lot of the day kind of thinking of. about some of the stuff people said to us and we talked about, I kind of have a couple conclusions about that.

But like that's just one piece that's going on. You got to figure out the LeBron part of it. You got to figure out, okay, how much cap space do we really want to generate, which means potentially which players do we jettison. Then we've got to figure out how we're going to fill back in, I think probably around a Luca and LeBron presumed Luca, I'm sorry, Luca and Austin Corps. But then you got to figure out which players are available to you. Are you going to trade for them?

Are you going to try to sign them? Are you going to send out an offer sheet to a Walker Kessler or a Peyton Watson? There's a lot of just personnel stuff that you have to figure out in a weak, free agent year with an immense amount of pressure to reshape a roster that at least gets you close to championship contention with something that looks like it's. should work around Luca Donchard. That is just part one now, Andy. And it is a really big job that a lot of people worry Rob Polink is not up for.

I mean, a lot of this is really detail oriented. A lot of this is full top to bottom roster vision. And to be frank, that has not always been Rob Polinka's strength. I mean, we've seen that we've seen that Rob often gravitates towards. a very specific type of player, you know, a ball handling score, very offensively oriented. And, you know, he has, to be fair to Rob, early in his time doing this, put together a roster that won a championship, or at least some of it was constructed in the beginning with magic in charge, but there were finishing touches Rob put on it.

and whether having the foresight to kind of keep Danny Green in your hip pocket, waiting out the Kauai thing because Danny Green happened to be doing that, rolling the dice correctly on Dwight Howard, even finding a locker room guy that really mattered like a Jared Dudley. Rob did good work there. I also thought, you know, identifying Avery Bradley, who had been a Rob Belinka client. Like these were decisions that worked well.

You and I both thought that given the quick turnaround after the bubble to the beginning of the next season, running back the roster as is just was not practical. You needed some fresh legs in there. Dennis Schroeder, Montres Harrell, like they worked for the regular season. The problems that season were Anthony Davis and LeBron getting hurt. It wasn't roster construction. I still believe if Anthony Davis didn't get hurt, the Lakers go to the Western Conference. From there, though, Rob's work has been very spotty, very all over the place, and more importantly, and I think what scares a lot of Laker fans, lacking a clarity of vision. Like if you, if someone asked me, what is Rob Polinka's vision as an exec for building rosters? I mean, other than identifying stars, wanting stars, and like I said, wanting ball handling scores, I would say mostly his vision as a basketball executive is,

how do I keep my job? There has not been a clear vision of what Rob really values from top to bottom or meshing skill sets, things like that. And this is where, by the way, I think it is so important to be bringing in the outside voices that assuming this is all being done in good faith turn into sounding boards for Rob to listen to and hopefully not. threatened by, but also too, just the legwork and the going through tape and the

identification of these players and going through all the different possibilities. Again, it is too much for Rob Polinka to be essentially unilaterally in charge of, and it's simply too much on his plate, regardless of whatever disagreements or concerns you have about his vision for building in the first place. Right. And like, you know, like I don't think there's a, it's not, likely not coincidental. The Lakers have struggled to be creative. They've struggled on the margins.

They've made mistakes that don't seem like a big deal, but, you know, turn into it. You know, losing second round picks on things like unloading Marcus Saul or needing to use a second round pick, great, got you, Luca Donchich, but to facilitate Jalen Hood, Schafino, but like, just kind of being, treating little. things like that is disposable before you even get into some of the bigger decisions. But like that's one thing. Like this is one huge, like how you handle this summer. Because again, I think it's going to be really hard to transform the Lakers into a title

contender this offseason. But you have to, it's going to be challenging. It's not impossible, challenging. But you have to turn the ship, recalibrated for Luca Donchage, and make it very clear that, okay we're up this a little player here a rotation piece here short or maybe you're you work on maybe you trade austin for depth and you and you you've got everything but that second star but the rest of the architecture is there and you're one bigger player away from okay that's in and of itself a huge job to do that while you are also bringing in and building out

a staff in basketball operations, in scouting, which I still have not seen anything. For what it is worth really quick, I had Ramona Shelburne on Lakers talk, my weekly Lakers show for 710 ESPN in Los Angeles. And, you know, Ramona knows the inner workings of the Lakers front office as well as anybody. And Ramona said they actually have not necessarily specific for scouting. She didn't even say which department, but she said that they have brought in some people. They have not announced anything yet. They haven't felt the need to announce it. But they've already taken steps in terms of filling out some of that infrastructure.

And I did not get a sense she met just Farah, and Zaidi, and Andrew Friedman. But that gets to actually where I was going, which is what you really want to make sure you're not doing is both of those things at the same. time. And so the Lakers have 20 some odd regular season games left. They've got hopefully a round

or two of the playoffs. And then the draft follows pretty closely after the finals. They got a lot of legwork to do there with all the picks they can on and so on and so on. They need to be on the basketball ops part of this thing and work this quick

because you want as close to a working infrastructure as you can get before you're saying you don't have to finish but you at least want to start you need to have your scouts you need if you're going to try to build and bring in more basketball voices you want those people in before you're done with you know or as very as quickly as you possibly can once the season is over is there certain people you probably have to wait to get before then this process And again, this is why I think they're leaning on guys like Andrew Friedman and Far Anxiety. Those people are there not to give Polinka advice on which power forward to go get. They're there to give him advice and how to advise him on process and architecture. They need to get that stuff worked out and hopefully already have been because you just don't want to be doing those two things at once. And I agree with you. In a perfect world, you have multiple voices. multiple bits of intelligence, multiple people producing intelligence,

providing Rob with everything that he needs to be able to do to be the ultimate, you know, decider in this incredibly critical offseason. Yeah, the last thing I would say on this is that my hope, you know, the glass half full hope for this new situation moving forward as somebody like you who has expressed many doubts and reservations about Rob Polika in this seat for many, many years. I hope is that this new infrastructure could actually bring out a better version or the best in Rob Polika because if he leans into this new situation as opposed to being territorial, he will hopefully be getting better advice around him, better insight.

And Rob Polinka has been around basketball for a long time. Like he played at Michigan. Like it's not that he is ignorant of the game at all, even if what appears to be a lot of his vision or values with the game don't necessarily align with mine or I think yours. He's clearly not without knowledge at all. And if now he's put in a situation where one way or another, trying to consolidate his power or, you know,

protect his power, protect that space is likely a waste of time. That's exactly. I'm so glad you put it that way. It's a waste of time. Maybe this just brings out the best version of Rob because that energy is just going to be focused on his job. I'm fascinated by who he's going to bring in. I'm genuinely fascinated by where they go to find talent.

Now that they have the checkbook to draw talent from a lot of different places, who do they bring in who does rob hire because like you say I mean he's going to be at the undisputedly at the top of the pecking order that's what they've arranged here that's how this is going to go there's not going to hire somebody to put above rob I can put rob in charge of hiring somebody to put above him to you know check rob's work you know this off season rob's can be in charge of it but like you say if he does a bad job and gets super territorial about it and whatever and seems to try to sort of once in a long almost game the system, it's going to lose his job.

So you might as well try and get the right people, do a good job, and then you get to keep it. So we'll see how it goes. Lockdown Lakers on YouTube is where you can go hang out with over 37,000 subscribers to the channel. Plenty more to talk about with Austin Reeves, with the Lakers, with what's coming up this summer,

and what's coming up on Thursday for a huge game against the suns. Check us out. Cam Brothers on Twitter. We'll see everyone next time.