“I’ll try to get in a lot more weekends there and stay close and connected to Phil while doing my job,” she said, adding that she had a “real soft spot in my heart for the Knicks.”

It makes for a delicate, and potentially awkward, balancing act — juggling a relationship with a basketball legend who is heading east while she serves as a rival executive on the opposite coast at a moment when her team needs her.

Buss emerged on the Los Angeles scene in 1979 when she won a “Miss Palisades” beauty contest. The next year, when her father bought the famed Los Angeles estate Pickfair, “it seemed to transform all of us into Hollywood royalty,” she wrote in her memoir.

Jeff Pearlman, the author of the new book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” said of Buss, “Back in the day, she was known as one of L.A.’s most eligible.”

The Lakers’ championship runs kept her elbow to elbow with celebrities — she celebrated her 20th birthday with Michael Jackson — and she dated John McEnroe and the former hockey player Jay Wells. She was married to an Olympic gold medalist, the volleyball player Steve Timmons, from 1990 to 1993.

In 1995, around the same time she attended her first N.B.A. Board of Governors meeting, she posed nude for Playboy, a spread that included photos of her throughout the Forum, the Lakers’ arena at the time. (Her father, who owned a Playboy Club in Phoenix, said, “This is the first issue of Playboy I will not read.”) Three years later, she posed provocatively for Sports Illustrated; she now uses a photo from that shoot as her Twitter avatar.

Over the years, though, she has also emerged as a well-respected business mind. She began her career with her family’s team tennis and roller hockey teams — she was “tossed lame sports by her father and yet made something of each of them,” John McEnroe told Sports Illustrated in 1998 — before running events at the Forum and getting an executive role with the Lakers in 1999.