Can anyone trust Lakers leadership at their word?

Jeanie Buss attempted to clear the air with her extended sit-down with Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times, and as the Talk-O-Tuesday podcast discovered, she didn’t exactly do herself many favors.

After combing through that interview, and a subsequent conversation that Plaschke had with Doug Gottlieb, the “I Love Basketball” crew of Sabreena Merchant and Raj Chipalu were left with several questions, chief among them: who actually bears responsibility for basketball decisions?

Buss said she is “held accountable for every decision” that is made by the Lakers, but Rob Pelinka has also said that he has the final say on basketball matters and all the while fans have been pelted with leaks that it was LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Klutch Sports who wanted to trade for Russell Westbrook. Those three messages are all mutually exclusive!

Add on to that the ever-expanding crew of former Laker luminaries whom Buss has brought into her circle of trust, and it’s not exactly clear whose opinions are guiding the organization.

Sabreena and Raj attempted to sort through the team’s perpetually ambiguous basketball operations structure and also tried to figure out what to make of the weird kind-of-but-not-really report that Phil Jackson wants to trade LeBron James. They also touched on their adopted teams in this year’s postseason, and made some predictions for the remainder of the conference semifinals.

You can listen to the full episode below, and to make sure you never miss a show, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

And for a short-form recap pod, check out Lakers Lowdown, in which Anthony Irwin recaps the previous day’s news and gets you ready for the day ahead in LakerLand, every weekday morning on the Silver Screen & Roll Podcast feed.