Lakers owner Jeanie Buss concedes franchise hasn't 'lived up to the brand'

The Los Angeles Lakers are taking this lottery season pretty hard.

Now that her team has been officially eliminated from the playoffs, despite adding LeBron James over the summer, Lakers owner Jeanie Buss all but conceded that the franchise has lost its luster during a guest lecture in Jeff Pearlman’s journalism class at Chapman University, per The Panther Online (via Silver Screen and Roll):

“We haven’t lived up to the brand that (my father) created, and he created a culture of winning and success,” Buss said. “(The Lakers) were always relevant and they were always in the conversation, and I felt like the team had lost that importance.”

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“We want a team the community can be proud of, and we bring in players that can fit part of something bigger than their individual selves,” Buss said. “(I want to) build something special that, just as my dad said so many years ago, that the community can be proud of.”

The Lakers have failed to make the playoffs in all six full seasons since the death of longtime owner Dr. Jerry Buss. The franchise previously missed the playoffs just five times since its inception in 1948. Jeanie Buss assumed controlling ownership of the organization from her father after he succumbed to cancer in February 2013.

Four years later, as the playoff drought gained steam, the younger Buss fired her brother, Jim, the vice president of basketball operations, and longtime general manager Mitch Kupchak. She respectively replaced them with Rob Pelinka and Magic Johnson, vowing to restore glory to the 16-time NBA champion Lakers.

The team did sign James this past summer, but glory has remained elusive. On the same day details of Buss’ lecture at Chapman were published, rival executives offered a scathing rebuke of the Lakers brass, anonymously outlining the leadership group’s many recent failures to Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck:

The expectations will only increase this summer, when the Lakers will have enough salary cap space to sign another max player in a free agency class that will include Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Kyrie Irving, Jimmy Butler, Klay Thompson and Kemba Walker, among others. Many around the NBA have expressed doubts that the Lakers will land a top-tier member of that class, but James is staying positive.

"I'm confident that players want to play with me,” James told Beck. “I'm very confident in that."

Expectations among Lakers fans are built on statements like this. But if that confidence turns to frustration this summer, a little more of that luster will be lost.

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Ben Rohrbach is a staff writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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