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In the spring of 2022, Lakers president and controlling owner Jeanie Buss turned on HBO’s Winning Time and was transported back to the start of her career.
The well-received but short-lived series, based on Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, traced how her father, Dr. Jerry Buss, bought a floundering NBA franchise and quickly turned it into a world-class operation. It brought back vivid memories for Buss—glimpses at her dad’s brilliant and tempestuous ownership, Magic Johnson’s rise to fame, and her own college-aged education inside a male-dominated front office.
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“They really captured my dad,” Buss tells TIME. “But it was very frustrating to not be involved with a project that is basically telling your life story.”
Which is why, a couple years earlier, Buss started sniffing around Hollywood to develop projects herself—first by executive-producing a team docuseries, then looking to develop her own narrative. After decades accruing unique stories and “crazy situations” with her business partner and friend Linda Rambis, she pitched around a television series based on her own glass-breaking experiences running the Lakers. “We would always talk about how it would be a great setting for a television show,” Buss says, likening the pair’s experiences to Lucy and Ethel. It wasn’t until they met with writer and executive producer Mindy Kaling, though, that an idea crystallized. “She saw something in our relationship, in our situation, and was inspired,” she adds.
The long-gestating result is Running Point, a 10-episode Netflix comedy series that centers around Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson), the blonde, battle-tested, and newly-appointed controlling owner of the fictional Los Angeles Waves. The show, written by Kaling, David Stassen, and Ike Barinholz, is a bouncy look at the inside of a flailing NBA organization and covers just about every relationship in Isla’s personal and professional life—from her doting fiancé, to her manipulative brothers, to her motley crew of star and problematic players. Like in most family businesses, Isla struggles to keep her worlds separate.
An executive producer on the project, Buss emphasizes that “while we inspired so much of the story, these characters are not my family, and Isla Gordon is not me.” But you don’t have to squint too hard (or have in-depth knowledge of the Lakers) to see the direct similarities. Throughout the season, Isla tussles with her brothers for control of the Waves, refuses to trade players that the organization expects her to, battles with misogynistic owners, manages salacious tabloid rumors, and navigates undeniable chemistry with her head coach. The Waves might not don purple and gold, but there’s no denying this is Buss’ world and history.
“I’ve found that people love to hear stories about the behind-the-scenes of the Lakers,” Buss says. “And you’ll see a lot of what goes on behind the scenes. It’s not all perfect, that’s for sure.”
How Jeanie Buss’ career influenced the writing team
Before Kaling, Stassen, and Barinholtz began sketching out a script, they spent months researching Buss’ accomplishments, experiences, and the family dynamic that would make up the heart of the show.
As detailed in her autobiography, Buss began her sports-executive journey in 1979, establishing a working relationship with Magic Johnson, pursuing a degree at USC, and serving as president of the L.A Strings, a World Team Tennis franchise that her father also owned. Throughout the 1990s, she graduated to larger roles. Buss ran the L.A. Blades (a pro inline hockey team), took over the Forum, and attended NBA board of governors meetings. These jobs and the networking opportunities they provided proved useful when her father died in 2013 and she took over as controlling owner of the Lakers, a pivot that shook up the family hierarchy and the league’s boys club mentality.
In the midst of the Netflix series’ development, Buss and Rambis became frequent and gracious hosts for the writing team, taking the trio on tours of the arena and sitting down to answer hours of questions. Stassen was eager to explore Buss’ granular, day-to-day duties as much as her overarching philosophy as president. “You just start responding to their stories and you start to see the world and your questions maybe change a little bit,” Stassen says. “What are the things that you have people below you handle? How much interaction do you have with players? How does the team move 25 players and staff around the country for a road trip?”
Stassen was leary of mapping out a story that matched Buss’ beat by beat. Though he read her autobiography, he refused to watch Winning Time to prevent any unintentional influence on his creative process. Instead, the team wanted to build a unique protagonist with a distinct personality, but one indentured to Buss’ real challenges and clever solutions. “We really wanted to just veer into a straight comedy,” Stassen says, while also acknowledging “the greatness of the Lakers, the pressure the town put on the Lakers and casts on her. It was all an inspiration.”
When it came to casting Hudson, Buss knew the A-lister would be up for the challenge. She already had history on her side. The Lakers owner remembers chauffeuring and touring Hudson as a 16-year-old around the Forum in the 1990s when her parents Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn attended L.A. Kings games. “I kind of took her under my wing because she’s a very curious person, asked a lot of questions,” Buss says. “I knew she could nail the part because she’d seen me in action, and she understood how the back of the house of a sports team worked.
“I really didn’t have to coach her at all. She brought it and she nailed it.”
The challenges of running a family business
Much like the Buss family, the Gordon family is not without its drama. Left to run the Waves after his father’s death, eldest brother and team president Cam (Justin Theroux) resigns due to a drug scandal and appoints his overlooked sister Isla to take over his position. This comes as a slight to brothers Sandy (Drew Tarver) and Ness (Scott MacArthur), the team’s CFO and general manager, respectively, who want to trade away their major players and are content to miss the playoffs. They eventually take their concerns with her optimistic approach to the board and host a vote of no confidence to oust her, but the plan backfires.
The sequence of events isn’t far from the truth. When Dr. Buss died in 2013, he arranged for Jeanie to succeed him as controlling owner, and appointed her brother, Jim, to run basketball operations. However, the late Buss had always envisioned Jeanie and Magic Johnson running the Lakers together one day—a reality that eventually occurred in 2017 when Jeanie replaced her older sibling with the legendary point guard to turn around six straight losing seasons.
“The way my brother saw things was that he wanted the team to go through a losing phase so that we could amass draft picks and cap space and then build the team that way,” Buss says. “Well, that was not the product that Dr. Buss delivered to the fans. There was just a turning point where enough was enough because I felt that our brand was being eroded.”
The front office shakeup didn’t go over smoothly. Jim and brother Johnny called a shareholder’s meeting and aimed to oust Jeanie from the board by electing new candidates. But Jeanie’s lawyer filed a restraining order to block the meeting, and the NBA had her back. Eventually, the brothers canceled the election, resolved the litigation, and signed a contract that made Jeanie the team’s controlling owner for the rest of her life. Less than two years later, LeBron James signed with the Lakers and “that really changed everything,” she says.
“It might sound like I wrestled control from my brother, but really, the way my dad had written the trust, it was clear that I was ultimately in charge,” adds Buss, who is now on good terms with her brother. “[My dad] gave me the hammer to make sure that I took care of the baby—and the baby was suffering. I had to do what I had to do.”
A constant battle prove herself
It’s not easy to be at the center of the most popular NBA franchise, especially if you’re a woman. That’s what Isla discovers quickly into her new tenure. She’s often dismissed for her past modeling endeavors. At owners meetings, she’s double-crossed and leered at by older men. And every basketball decision she makes comes with extra judgment from her brothers.
That’s something Buss, who entered teenage beauty contests and posed for Playboy in 1995, experienced on a daily basis. “I spent a lot of my 30s trying to dress the part, act the part, impress those around me,” Buss says. “I finally realized that no matter what, I couldn’t please other people, because for whatever reason, they may not want to like me and there wasn’t anything I could do to change their opinion and that was a waste of my time.”
The mentality helped her as she began dating (and then eventually married) Lakers head coach Phil Jackson in 1999. Their 14-year relationship earned a lot of press attention, but Buss valued his spiritual thinking and he provided her “the validation that maybe I needed,” she says. “Jeanie told us she didn’t mind dating someone she worked with at the time,” Stassen says. “She was like, ‘We had the same love, it was the best of both worlds,’ which is interesting. That’s not a perspective anyone ever vocalizes.”
There are nods to these unique challenges in Running Point, like Isla’s attraction to the Waves’ head coach (Insecure‘s Jay Ellis), and then a mistakenly romantic dinner meeting with a point guard (Chet Hanks) that turns into a viral misunderstanding. “My dad took Magic under his wing. And certainly I have players like that—close friends that, because of the male-female dynamic, might [spark] social media speculation about any kind of physical relationship, which is not true. It’s mind-boggling that people want to go there.”
Reflecting on her highs and lows
There are plenty of other details throughout the series that pull from Buss’ real life—including a plotline involving the Gordon family’s secret half-brother Jackie, played by Fabrizio Guido, who initially asks for a financial payout before taking a low-level job in the family business. (In 2018, Buss and her siblings discovered they had a long-lost older sister who had been adopted in third grade without their knowledge.)
But it was an early scene in the series, when Isla inadvertently signs a document that her brothers foist on her, that felt most authentic to the start of her career. “I live back those kinds of conversations and it hurts,” Buss says. “I think a lot of women will connect with that. That’s the story that I hope people see different parts of—women who are in business and having to deal with those same kinds of issues, and people who work in a family business and the competition that’s there.”
Watching it back was cathartic, but it also affirmed some of the big decisions Buss had to make without her father at the helm. Namely, the decision to pull off the Anthony Davis trade (that involved parting with a few prized players), which would eventually net them an NBA championship during the pandemic bubble season. “My dad was a really great poker player, and he used to try to teach me poker, take me to the tables,” Buss recalls. “I finally said, ‘Dad, why are you making me do this? I don’t like it, I don’t want to play poker. And he goes, ‘I’m just trying to teach you that poker is a game of patience. It might take a long time, but once you get the cards, you have to be able to go from zero to 100 at the drop of a hat.’
“I thought my dad would have been very proud of me [for the trade], because I pushed the chips onto the table.” Will a big trade (perhaps similar to her recent one involving Luka Doncic) make its way into a potential Season 2? Buss laughs. “I guess we could add that part,” she says.
