Young sports fans these days don’t understand how good they have it. Every game today is live on television in high definition. If you can’t get to a TV, you can stream the game on your phone or record it to watch later. Back in the day, you would be lucky to recognize players on TV without seeing the names on the back of their jerseys.
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Watching any NBA broadcast from the ’80s or ’90s is the same as a modern gamer trying to go back and play an original PlayStation game with its primitive, chunky graphics. Fans who watched those old games were grateful for what they got, because there was actually a time when you couldn’t even watch games live.
Most games, even during the NBA Finals, were on tape delay. Most people don’t realize that one of the people responsible for ushering in a new era was former Lakers owner, Dr. Jerry Buss.
Buss co-founded Prime Ticket, one of the first cable stations, so that every Lakers game could be broadcast live to millions of people. This helped build the Lakers brand into one of the most recognizable in sports around the world.
As former trainer Gary Vitti said on Byron Scott’s Fast Break, part of Buss’s efforts to expand the Lakers footprint was to bring the team to Hawaii for training camp. “They realized that Hawaii had all these Lakers fans,” he said. “Everybody in Hawaii was a Laker fan.”
“And so, what Dr. Buss realized, was that we could sell cable TV in Hawaii. They could watch all the Laker games. And the best way to market it was to go over there and have training camp and play two games.”
Buss first took the team to Hawaii in 1988, beginning a tradition that would happen 15 times between that year and 2015. Vitti said that the Lakers would even pay for another West Coast team like the Kings or Warriors to hold their camp there and play two exhibition games, all in the name of promoting Prime Ticket.
The Lakers enjoyed it so much that they just kept doing it, but Vitti once told Buss that he didn’t think it was beneficial to the players because of the travel, jet lag and inferior, air conditioning-less facilities to what the team was used to. “Physiologically, it didn’t make any sense at all,” he said, much to his boss’ chagrin.
He told Buss this during a team dinner, and when the legendary owner briefly left the table, Jerry West hilariously gave Vitti a kick and said, “Don’t tell him that, he won’t let us come over here any more!”
The last time the Lakers held camp in Hawaii was 2015, since they built a new state-of-the-art training facility that opened in 2017 (they held camp at UC Santa Barbara in 2016). Hawaii has gotten some NBA visitors since, though, most recently when the Clippers and Warriors both held camp in Oahu and played an exhibition in 2024.
Buss was a true innovator, and Vitti’s story about Prime Ticket and the Lakers’ Hawaii trips are just the tip of the iceberg as to why. New Lakers owner Mark Walter has a lot to live up to now that he’s taken over majority ownership of the team from the Buss family.
