Tuesday night Magic Johnson decided to quit his position has President of the Los Angeles Lakers. A decision that left Los Angles Lakers star LeBron James shocked. And really shocked the entire Internet. But why did he quit? According to him it was because he wanted to be happy and be able to talk to other players without being fined…
Maybe that is the case.
But according to a new report ESPN is about to publish an employee misconduct article which Johnson heard about before hand.
As word spread through the Lakers’ organization and the NBA, several people wondered whether Johnson’s departure was related to a yet-to-be-published article by ESPN that is said to address allegations about Johnson’s conduct with employees.
And today Steven A. Smith even mentioned the yet to be posted article.
“Magic Johnson feels betrayed. Magic Johnson feels betrayed by folks within the Lakers organization. Not Jeanie Buss, but folks within the Lakers organization. He was hearing the chirping and the whispering, which he alluded to in the press conference yesterday.” – Stephen A. Smith
“And there’s so much stuff that’s been going on,” he continued. “It’s absolutely ridiculous. You hear about some exposé that ESPN or someone was going to report, because people were chirping about what he was like as a boss. That annoyed him. You’ve got Rob Pelinka, the general manager, pivotal in all this, because he was the individual who was talked about at Lakers facilities constantly joking around asking the question Where’s Magic? — to bring attention to the fact that Magic Johnson was perceived as being an absentee executive.”
When Magic was asked about the ESPN report he replied:
“Never disrespected anybody. Never did anything bad. Am I tough? Hell, yeah! You work for me, I’m demanding. But at the same time I’m fair. They’ve been talking about that article for how many months? Everybody running, ‘Oh they’re writing an article.’ I’m gonna say, why didn’t they interview anybody at ESPN? If I was doing something wrong to employees disrespecting, this or that, think they would’ve hired me twice?”
An ESPN spokesperson when asked about the situation replied: “It is our journalistic practice never to discuss or comment on reporting we do before we’re prepared to share that work with our audience.”
So now it is a waiting game for ESPN to publish to news.
