Ivica Zubac was injured in the first quarter of Thursday night’s game against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Results of the X-rays were negative and the MRI confirmed a high ankle sprain in his right ankle.

Zubac will be out for the remainder of the season and will be re-evaluated in two weeks.

Nick Young might opt out of his $5.7 million player option for the 17-18 season after he rebuilt his value with the Los Angeles Lakers.

The Lakers considered using the stretch provision on Young last offseason, which seemed like a good idea at the time but would have been a mistake considering how well he's played.

Young is averaging 13.2 points on 40.4 percent shooting.

“I got a chance to play and show Nick Young again after going through everything I went through,” Young said. “That’s the best part of everything, being able to play. You think you won’t be in the league last year. Then you start 60 games.”

Young and his agent haven't decided what they'll do but he would prefer to stay with the Lakers.

“It’s L.A. I’m from here, family is here,” Young said. “I’ve been here for four years.”

Jim Buss resigned as a co-trustee as part of a requirement by Jeanie Buss to resolve his takeover attempt.

Her younger sister and staunch ally, Janie, replaced the brother, joining Jeanie and Johnny Buss as co-trustees.

“The message is clear here: Do not underestimate Jeanie Buss,” her attorney, Adam Streisand, told the Los Angeles Times. “There is not going to be a palace coup. Not now. Not ever.”

The brothers called an annual shareholders meeting last month, three days after Jeanie Buss overhauled the front office. She hired Magic Johnson as president of basketball operations and removed Jim Buss as executive vice president of basketball operations.

The family trusts require her to serve as controlling owner.

Rob Pelinka was recently on Adrian Wojnarowski's podcast and was asked about how he had thought about becoming an NBA general manager for a considerable amount of time and how he is managing the demands of the job.

“I feel like this is the sweet spot for kind of who I am with my background having gone to law school, having worked as an agent for almost 20 years and understanding the cap and how the system works, how modern day players think," said Pelinka "I went to business school and got a business degree and then basketball of course, having played in three Finals Fours. Those are my passions in life and they all kind of converge in this job.

“I think more than anything, Dr. (Jerry) Buss is our north star. He revolutionized the entire landscape of professional sports when he converged entertainment and sports together and kind of broke the mold. We’re still living with a lot of his vision today across all sports leagues. 

“And I think we feel the same," said Pelinka. "We have a platform that is second to none with this Lakers’ platform. We see an opportunity to cast a new vision for the future. The Lakers were always a team going back in history where all the other 29 teams were saying ‘hey how can we do it like the Lakers do?’ and maybe we lost that a little bit. I think it’s time to think that way again and hopefully get back to a position where others are saying ‘gosh, look at how the Lakers are doing things, we’d love it if we could do it that way.’

"It’s a challenge. It starts with Magic and I casting that vision and seeing it through.

"In terms of your specific question, one of the things Dr. Buss always said and I know Jeanie (Buss) is aligned to this. The Lakers are the Lakers when there’s a star in the building. The greats are so easily listed. Magic, Shaq, Kobe, Jerry West, Wilt. I can go on and on down the list. We feel like this is a perfect platform for hopefully that next player to eventually say there’s no city like LA, there’s no team that has the legacy like the Lakers. This could be my home someday. The perfect platform to accomplish what I want to with my career. I think that’s an important thing we make sure happens.

The Los Angeles Lakers were unwilling to pay Shaquille O'Neal the type of contract he sought in 2004.

Jerry Buss informed O'Neal of the Lakers' position and that triggered what was believed to be at the time as a trade request at least partially due to O'Neal's deteriorating relationship with Kobe Bryant. The Lakers were also contending with Bryant's free agency that offseason.

O'Neal was traded to the Miami Heat and he helped them win a title two years later in 2006.

“He called me and said hey we’re going to do something else, and I understood that,” O’Neal said. “Me being a marketing genius that I am, I wanted it to look like something else, but it really was never that.”

O'Neal remained close with Jerry Buss and his relationship with Bryant has improved with each passing year.

Gary Vitti retired at the end of last season after 32 years with the Los Angeles Lakers. While Vitti retired from his full time position, he signed on as a consultant for two more seasons.

Vitti kept a small office down a hallway at the team's practice facility in El Segundo, California, where he could be found on most weekdays, calling software engineers and analytics firms, meeting with vendors about wearable sensors and sneaker microchips, examining SportVU data and the latest trends in sports medicine and nutrition.

Since the Lakers' front office overhaul on Feb. 21st, Vitti has been noticeably absent.

Vitti had been seen at every home game save for one and at the facility about four days a week when the team wasn't on the road but hasn't been seen at all since the regime change.

"We love Gary and look forward to honoring his contract," the spokesperson said.

Vitti issued the following comment to ESPN regarding his status with the Lakers:

"I worked more than half of my life for the Lakers, and I can honestly look at myself in the mirror and say I gave every ounce that I had every day. I will forever be grateful to [the late Lakers owner and patriarch] Dr. [Jerry] Buss, a man I believe exemplified what I believe to be the trifecta of the most important human values: honesty, kindness and loyalty. Going forward, it's not my team so Jeanie can do what she thinks is best."

The Los Angeles Lakers are finalizing a two-year deal with David Nwaba.

Nwaba has been with the Lakers on a 10-day contract.

The Lakers will have a team option on Nwaba for the 17-18 season.

D'Angelo Russell was the last player Rob Pelinka and Magic Johnson spoke to after practice on Thursday.

The trio talked about Russell's recent struggles and his demotion to the bench.

"It was just more of clearing up a little bit of things," Russell said at shootaround ahead of Friday's game against the Milwaukee Bucks, "as far as what they want to see from these last few games and stuff like that."

Russell was asked what Johnson and Pelinka are looking for.

"Be aggressive," Russell said. "No matter what my role is, just be aggressive."

Luke Walton recently moved Russell to the bench, starting Jordan Clarkson at point guard instead of him.

"Of course I want him to respond better," Walton said at shootaround. "I want him to be aggressive. I want him to be really aggressive, even more so right now while he's coming off the bench. That doesn't mean he's coming in to shoot every time. But aggressive as far as pushing the ball, getting in the lane, and every time he's coming off of picks and playmaking as a way to get himself more into the game quicker.

"It's completely different when you start and naturally fall into the rhythm of the game. So we're looking for him to come out and be ultra-aggressive in that role while he's in it."

Russell disagrees with the notion that he hasn't been aggressive enough lately, but he's open to feedback.

"I think I was, I guess my mentality wasn't in the right place," Russell said. "I wasn't really making shots. I didn't create for others, either.

"It's just new, being in the position I was in, finding the openings. [They] are all in foreign positions for me."

Jeanie Buss is seeking assurances from Johnny Buss and Jim Buss that they will vote for her to remain both the controlling owner and a member of the Los Angeles Lakers' board of directors for the rest of her life.

The documents were in response to a filing by Jim and Johnny's attorneys that affirmed they'd vote her into the team's board of directors for at least the next year.

In a letter sent to Jeanie Buss and other members of the Lakers' board on Feb. 24, Jim and Johnny proposed a slate of four directors that did not include Jeanie Buss or Joey Buss, who had previously served on the board.

Jeanie Buss' lawyers argued in court March 2 that Jim and Johnny are breaching their fiduciary responsibilities as trustees by not including her in the slate of proposed directors.

Luke Walton is attempting to keep the challenges of coaching a rebuilding team in perspective during the grind of his first season as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.

"The core of the job is awesome," Walton said. "I get to get in my car every day and I love coming to work -- and not many people get to do that. Coming into the building is exciting, every day, no matter how many we've lost or won. Again, the outliers make life frustrating at times and you can't sleep at night and you don't have an appetite, but that's short lived. Everything else in life is awesome still."

Walton recalls Dec. 14, when the Lakers lost to the Nets in Brooklyn, falling for the eighth game in a row. "And I had all the tricks I had in the bag as far as different ways to get the team out of a funk," Walton says. "I had tried all of them. And we just kept losing and losing." He stared at the ceiling of his New York hotel room, telling himself, "This is crazy, you know what we've got to do. Let's keep [at it]. And still, it took a while to even be aware of it to get myself out of that low." He adds, "I know this is what I signed up for, but I was dark."

The Lakers started the season strong but have fallen to the bottom of the NBA.

"It's way more intense as far as these day-to-day decisions that need to be made, as far as what's best for this moment and what's best for us in the future as far as where we're trying to go," he says. "That's kind of a learning-on-the-go type of thing. If one assistant has an opinion this way, another assistant has another opinion another way with it, it's trial-and-error with it."

Walton has sought counsel from Steve Kerr and he also has reached out to Phil Jackson.

"The job itself is still the same," he says. "It's rewarding. It's exciting. Now we're competing for different things there and here, but the competition level is right there from the daily practices to the games. We only lost nine games last year, and I remember being sick after every one of them. It's crazy. The feeling, that's always there. What I'm trying to say is the core of this year and last year are the same, at least for me.

"I absolutely loved the job and the opportunity of coming in and trying to figure things out as a group and motivate and this and that. Now all the little outliers are completely different. It's feeling pretty incredible every night driving home as opposed to the thousand different things that are going off in my head in terms of what we need to do, this and that."

Walton is in Year 1 of a five-year deal making between $5 million and $6 million per season.

"I'm going to be just fine," Walton says, "and we're going to be just fine as a team. It's just part of the way it works, right? It's part of the grind."