The Buss family’s basketball story did not end when Mark Walter’s purchase of the Lakers was finalized, and it did not end when the new regime showed Joey and Jesse Buss the door in November.
Joey and Jesse Buss are making an aggressive pursuit through their investment firm, Buss Sports Capital, to become part of an ownership group in the NBA Europe league, sources told ESPN.
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) July 15, 2026
On Wednesday, ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported that the two brothers are pushing hard, through their investment firm Buss Sports Capital, to buy into an ownership group in the NBA’s planned European league.
Dan Woike of The Athletic added within minutes that the pursuit centers on three possible markets — London, Manchester and Lyon, France — and that the firm has already submitted multiple bids and is waiting on the league’s answer. For a family that spent nearly five decades synonymous with the Lakers, it amounts to the clearest signal yet of where the next chapter is headed, and it arrives at the exact moment the NBA says it is deciding who gets in.
Those sources say that Buss Sports Capital has made multiple bids and is awaiting word.
— Dan Woike (@DanWoikeSports) July 15, 2026
The bids land as Adam Silver finalizes NBA Europe’s first cities
The timing here is not incidental. Speaking after Tuesday night’s Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas, commissioner Adam Silver said he and deputy commissioner Mark Tatum plan to meet with a number of prospective ownership groups in the coming days, taking advantage of so many interested parties traveling to the New York area for Sunday’s FIFA World Cup final. The league is targeting a launch of the new European competition in the fall of 2027.
“We’ve had tremendous interest from multiple cities in Europe,” Silver said, adding that the league is in the process of finalizing bids for an initial group of cities.
That is the window the Buss brothers are trying to hit. Woike’s reporting that Buss Sports Capital has multiple bids in and is awaiting word suggests the firm is already inside the process Silver described rather than watching it from the outside, and McMenamin’s note that the brothers have a pre-existing relationship with Hall of Fame guard Tony Parker, with France viewed as one attractive market, gives the pursuit a specific shape.
Parker’s Lyon-based ASVEL has been openly positioning itself for the NBA’s European project —Â a connection worth unpacking below.
From fired Lakers executives to prospective owners
To appreciate what this pursuit represents, it helps to remember how the brothers’ time with the Lakers ended. On Nov. 20, the reorganized front office under Walter fired Joey and Jesse Buss from their positions as alternate governor and assistant general manager, respectively, and dismissed much of the scouting department along with them.
That department had spent a decade identifying value where other teams saw none, with Austin Reaves, Alex Caruso, Kyle Kuzma, Jordan Clarkson, Larry Nance Jr. and Max Christie among its finds.
Jesse Buss did not hide his frustration with how the succession played out, noting that the plan their father envisioned never materialized.
“But Jeanie has effectively kept herself in place with her siblings fired,” Jesse told ESPN in November.
The brothers kept their minority ownership shares in the Lakers, but their operational exile was total, and the infrastructure for what came next was already in place.
Two months before the firing, McMenamin and Shams Charania reported that Joey and Jesse were launching Buss Sports Capital, an investment vehicle built to buy into sports properties around the world, with CAA Evolution leading its transaction process and EM Securities serving as its banking partner. Jesse framed the venture in generational terms at the time.
“That’s what our dad would have wanted,” he told ESPN.
The generational math is hard to ignore. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers from Jack Kent Cooke in 1979 in a $67.5 million transaction, and his family sold controlling interest to Walter at a $10 billion valuation.
The sons who came up through the scouting ranks now have both the capital and, apparently, the appetite to build something of their own — and they are aiming it at the league’s most ambitious expansion in decades.
The Tony Parker connection runs through Lyon
Of the three markets Woike listed, Lyon is the one with an existing Buss paper trail. Back in May, Aris Barkas of Eurohoops reported that Joey and Jesse Buss and their fund were among the potential investors in ASVEL, Parker’s EuroLeague club in the Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne, with at least two other investors also in the picture.
The club is coming off a last-place EuroLeague season at 8-30 and is undergoing a full reset, with Parker himself moving from the front office to the bench as head coach. The scale of that reset is significant.
ASVEL’s budget could climb to roughly 25 million euros with the new investment, which would place the club among the biggest spenders in Europe.
Taken together with Wednesday’s reporting, a plausible through-line emerges: the brothers’ relationship with Parker, a possible stake in his club and Lyon’s appearance on the list of NBA Europe markets all point in the same direction, even if none of the reporting yet confirms that ASVEL itself would be the vehicle for a bid.
That last step remains unconfirmed, and it is worth being precise about the distinction between investing in Parker’s club and owning an NBA Europe franchise in Lyon.
A league with Lakers fingerprints all over it
What makes this more than a business story for Lakers fans is how much of the franchise’s orbit is already circling NBA Europe.
In May, Luka Doncic joined an ownership group led by former Mavericks executive Donnie Nelson that purchased Italian club Vanoli Cremona with plans to relocate it to Rome, and the group has formally submitted a bid for the team to represent Rome in the NBA’s proposed league. Jeanie Buss publicly celebrated her franchise player’s move at the time.
Love this! https://t.co/B078e0NGX6
— Jeanie Buss (@JeanieBuss) May 29, 2026
So the picture, less than a year after the sale closed, looks like this: The Lakers’ governor is cheering from Los Angeles, the Lakers’ best player has a bid in for Rome and the Lakers’ former scouting architects have multiple bids in across three markets of their own.
The family that turned a $67.5 million purchase into the model franchise of American sports is now trying to export that blueprint to a league that does not exist yet, competing in the same applicant pool as the star their old team traded for.
None of this changes anything on the Lakers’ cap sheet, and it should not be mistaken for basketball news in the transactional sense. But it is a meaningful marker of how thoroughly the franchise’s old brain trust has redirected its energy, and of how quickly NBA Europe has become the arena where Lakers-adjacent money and ambition are colliding.
Silver says the initial group of cities is being finalized now, which means the Buss brothers should not have to wait long for an answer. Whatever it is, the family that built the Lakers has made one thing plain: They intend to own basketball again, even if it has to be an ocean away.
