At 75 years old, longtime Disney CEO Bob Iger is making quite the transition to co-owner of the Los Angeles Lakers. But there might be one thing he has to address with Lakers fans.
He’s actually a Clippers fan.
And to give this story an Inception-like twist, he talked about it on the former podcast of current Lakers head coach JJ Redick.
ESPN broke the news on Tuesday that Iger and billionaire venture capitalist Josh Kushner would be buying the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter at a record price of $12.5 billion. The sale raises numerous questions, given a federal investigation hanging over Walter, Kushner’s obvious connections to the White House, and how it all came together so quickly.
And while Kushner’s net worth dwarfs that of Iger, the Disney CEO certainly knows a thing or two about running marquee businesses. Whether his knowledge of entertainment can translate to sports remains to be seen.
And the first step might be to explain whether he is still a fan of the Lakers’ crosstown rivals.
On January 22, 2021, Iger appeared on an episode of The Old Man and the Three as part of the show’s Leadership Series. At the time, JJ Redick was a podcast host and an ESPN analyst. And in a clip from the episode that has now gone viral following his joint purchase of the Lakers, Redick introduced Iger as a Clippers fan who developed a relationship with Redick while he was a player for the franchise.
New Lakers owner Bob Iger talks about his Clippers fandom with JJ Redick
Cheering for the Lakers is not in his DNA
pic.twitter.com/cnVP2jPbM5
— Clippers Lead (@ClippersLead) August 12, 2026
“I am a Clippers fan,” Iger said. “Having moved from New York to Los Angeles back in 2000 and being a big NBA fan, I needed a team to root for, and in my youth, the Lakers were a big rival of the Knicks, the team that I grew up rooting for. And so I couldn’t root for the Lakers very easily. It just was not in my DNA. And so I decided to adopt the Clippers, which was actually a good thing because their seats were a lot cheaper than the Lakers. And actually they were just on the cusp of actually being fun to watch.”
In all fairness to Bob Iger, those early 2000s Clippers teams with Elton Brand, Lamar Odom, Darius Miles, Quentin Richardson, and company were incredibly fun to watch. And he got to hang out with Billy Crystal and Penny Marshall. Win-win, right? Who would have thought this conversation would be revisited five years later, with the host as coach and the guest as the owner of the Lakers themselves? The odds of that happening are about as slim as Mark Madsen coming back to the team this season and winning Finals MVP.
But not only did Bob Iger admit to being a Clippers fan, but he also said he couldn’t be a Lakers fan because of his childhood love of the Knicks! This is a fanbase that struggled to accept LeBron James as a real Laker, even though he is one of the two best players in NBA history and the league’s all-time leading scorer. What are they going to do with a CLIPPERS FAN now owning the team?!?
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