It's hard to say why we save the things we save when someone dies. Why a particular shirt feels meaningful or why it's hard to delete certain voicemails. The list of things a loved one leaves in a will might be long. It's often what they didn't have to include in the will that sticks with you.

Among other things, Jim Buss saved a voicemail from his father from Jan. 20, less than a month before the Lakers' Hall of Fame owner, Jerry Buss, died after an 18-month battle with cancer. He has replayed it so many times he knows it by heart.

" 'Hey Jim, it's your dad,' " Buss says, mimicking his father's squeaky voice. " 'What an incredible waste of talent. Oh well. The experiment didn't work.' "

Buss had missed the call. His dad had wanted to talk to him about the Los Angeles Lakers' disappointing season. Run though all the decisions they'd made together that hadn't turned out the way they'd hoped. The offseason trades for Steve Nash and Dwight Howard that were supposed to make the $100 million Lakers title contenders, but ended up turning into an injury-riddled flop. The early-season firing of coach Mike Brown and surprising hire of Mike D'Antoni (over Phil Jackson) that could have made them look like savvy geniuses but instead came off as misguided and hurried. They had discussed those things backward and forward a thousand times already, and all roads came back to the same place.

"My dad was disappointed, just as all Laker fans should be disappointed that we didn't get to realize the dream of four Hall of Famers on the same team," Buss said in an interview with ESPNLosAngeles.com. "But hey, we went for it. What the hell. ...

"You fix it, and you move forward. You don't dwell on the past. You fix it, and you move on.

"We could've sat there and cried and said, 'Boy, oh boy, we just lost this kind of money.' We could've done this or that. But we were all on board. Every decision was made as a team. And we went down as a team. We'll live in the future the same way."

If ever there was a perfect articulation of Jerry Buss' philosophy, that might be it. Dr. Buss ran his basketball team like he had a big stack of chips in front of him at a high-stakes poker table. Every move was calculated risk and he was usually in the mood to gamble.

But when Jim Buss says something like that, Lakers fans get nervous. Actually, when Jim Buss says anything, Lakers fans get nervous.

Jim Buss, left, says if his father, Jerry, didn't have the confidence in him leading the Lakers into the future, his dad would have come up with an alternative plan. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

That was always going to be Jim Buss' destiny, until he did enough on his own to change it. His father made that clear to him from the start of the extended apprenticeship he's served in the family business, preparing him to lead the club's basketball operations once his father was gone.

"He always said, 'You have to have a shell and be able to repel water because you're going to get pelted," Buss said. "And I said, 'Dad, I have no problem with that as long as I believe that you believe in me and we believe in this philosophy.' "

Like everything in Lakerland for the past 35 years, Jerry Buss' judgment gave everyone comfort. He'd won enough big bets in his life that if he said something was a good risk, people tended to trust in it. In his last 10 years of life, and in his final will and testament, Jerry Buss trusted his son Jim to make the basketball decisions for the Lakers.

"If he didn't think I was capable of doing this, I guarantee he wouldn't have put me here," Buss said. "He would have arranged something else.

"But over years of dealing with him on every level and every contract and every negotiation and every thought of building a philosophy to win championships ... My dad trusted me. I know for a fact that if he didn't believe in what I was doing, he would not have just said, 'Well you're my son. Here you go.'

"No. That's not how I got this job."

Jim is not an extrovert. He's shy in most social situations, preferring to stay in the background with a baseball cap on and observe from a distance. He doesn't seek the spotlight. He avoids it. He stayed in the owner's suite at Staples Center after the Lakers won the 2010 NBA title. He watched the 2009 NBA Finals from Los Angeles, with his father. He has never participated in an on-court public ceremony for the Lakers. But he knows he must come out of the shadows now and let people get to know him. He knows he needs to talk about himself and his life, and the way he'll help run the franchise his father built into one of the most valuable and popular in all of sports.

"Change scares everybody," Buss said. "I understand that.

"We lost a great person, a great Laker fan, and by far and away, to me, the best owner in sports. But the stability and the passion with which we do our work is still there 100 percent."

Buss says that like he means it. And he does. He had plenty of opportunities to turn back from this life over the past two decades and didn't. Buss didn't grow up wanting to run the basketball operations for the Lakers; he wanted to be a math teacher. Jerry didn't even own the franchise until two years after Jim had graduated Palisades High in 1977.

But in 1981, a tragedy would change his life forever. His best friend was killed in a motorcycle accident during a vacation in Hawaii. Jim was devastated and lost. He turned away from the small businesses he and his friend had invested in together and let them wither. "You don't get over it," he said, more than 30 years later. "It just gets a little easier to think about as time goes on. ... I did every single thing with him. So when he was gone, it was like I'd lost half my personality."

Eventually, Jim eased back into work, selling tickets at the Great Western Forum in the same office as his sister, Jeanie, who was running the LA Strings franchise of World Team Tennis. It was never officially stated that Jerry was evaluating his children at the same time he was training them, but it was understood.

"It was just who he felt was making right decisions," Buss said. "Or who had the drive or the feel for it. I don't think it was planned from when I was a kid or after he bought the Lakers he said 'Jim's this guy. He's my buddy.' It was never planned like that. Jeanie worked her way up, too."

After a while, it was time to go out on his own, earn his own paycheck and make his own way. Jim left his father's business at the Forum and got into horse racing.

"I approached horse racing as I approach everything," he said. "I learn from observations and talk and ask questions, a lot of questions.

"I'm not afraid to ask simple questions . And I think people appreciate that because I'm not trying to know it all before I even know it."

Jim spent a decade learning the basketball business from his father and general managers Jerry West and Mitch Kupchak before he was entrusted with real power within the Lakers' organization. Gradually, his father gave him more and more responsibility. The last four or five years, he has been the primary day-to-day decision-maker. But until probably the last month of his life, the final word always rested with Dr. Buss.

"He'd say, 'Jim, you have the final hammer.' " the younger Buss said. "I said, 'No, I don't. My final hammer is to say you are the final hammer.'

"He liked that one."

Jerry was hospitalized for the final seven months of his life. Jim went to see his father almost every day.