Jeanie Buss labels the Los Angeles Lakers hiring of coach Mike D' Antoni over her fiancee and legendary franchise leader Phil Jackson "a betrayal."
According to ESPN, the team's chief of business operations and the daughter of longtime owner Dr. Jerry Buss made her assertions in an upcoming update to her memoir entitled "Laker Girl."
In an excerpt published in Sunday's L.A. Times, Buss adds she felt "she got played," in referring to how her brother, executive vice president, Jim Buss, came to his ultimate decision to hire D'Antoni, which, she insists, took both her and Jackson by surprise.
"Why did they have to do that?" Jeanie Buss wrote in the November edition of the book first published in 2010. "Why did Jim pull Phil back into the mix if he wasn't sincere about it? Phil wasn't looking for the job, and then he wasted 36 hours of his life preparing for it when they were never in a million years going to hire him anyway. How do you do that to your sister? How do you do that to Phil Jackson?"
Jim Buss has previously told ESPN his decision to hire D'Antoni reflect the final wishes of his father, who passed away last February after a near two-year battle with cancer.
"We did the coaching search and interviews and fed him all the information," Jim Buss told ESPN. "And he said, 'This is who I want. D'Antoni's the man.' Knowing that in the future we had to rebuild, he felt that Phil was not a guy to rebuild. It's not fair to him. It was actually more of a respectful thought towards Phil."
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