A well-run sports organization is a benevolent dicatorship. The L.A. Lakers haven’t figured this out

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From the outside, running a professional sports organization looks like a pretty simple proposition.

You put a couple of smart people in charge. You give them five years. After five years, you fire them. Then you hire a couple of more smart people.

The whole time, the money’s rolling in and the value of your asset is increasing exponentially. You don’t even have to win. It’s like owning General Motors, except no one expects you to make any cars.

That’s the easy way. Then there’s the Laker way.

On Tuesday, new L.A. coach Frank Vogel announced he is not worried about the team forcing him to hire former Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd as a condition of his employment.

“You can’t worry about looking over your shoulder,” Vogel told ESPN.

Funnily enough, this is the exact thing Caesar said as he walked across the Senate floor to have a predebate natter with Brutus.

Of course Vogel is worried. He’s a schlumpfing, pencil-necked stats geek sharing oxygen with a glamorous Hall of Famer in Los Angeles.

It’s not a question of whether Vogel is being replaced by his No. 2, but exactly how long it will take his body to hit the ground after he’s been pushed out of the team plane.

This is not how you do things. You don’t hire a coach as well as a spare coach for the same reason trucks do not have two steering wheels. Only one person can drive at a time.

You especially don’t do it when LeBron James is on the team, because he is the actual coach. That makes three coaches. The other two are there to fight over who holds the greaseboard during timeouts.

At least Magic Johnson is no longer coaching, because that would be too much.

Johnson had been the Lakers’ president until he quit a few weeks ago. He didn’t tender a resignation. Instead, he resigned during a live scrum. In keeping with the Laker way, this rather important decision was apparently taken on a whim and had something to do with wanting to tweet more.

After a cooling-off period, Johnson is now on a mini-media tour lighting what little dignity the organization still has on fire.

According to Johnson, there are three kinds of people running the Lakers – backstabbers, chumps and backstabbing chumps.

While Johnson is out there in public making himself unemployable for all of time, the Lakers are out in the free-agent market trying to buy James an NBA superfriend.

One can imagine how those free-agent interviews will go.

“Who exactly should I be addressing here?”

“Me.”

“No, me.”

James bursts through wall like Kool-Aid Man: “Who’s got my greaseboard?”

So good luck with that.

The Lakers are proof there is nothing as difficult in life as something that should be easy. There is a deep-seated human desire to complicate simple things. On sports teams, this need is compounded exponentially. The exacerbating problem is bureaucratic sprawl. One is constantly amazed at the number of people employed by the modern sports franchise – general managers, assistant general managers, assistants to the general manager and special assistants to God knows what. What do all these people do? It’s a mystery. But if you ask them, they will tell you they are superbusy doing it.

The more people you have weighing in on decisions, the more professional your outfit. That’s the thinking.

Anybody who actually works for a living knows that’s not how work works. More voices equals more opinions equals more turf-warring equals more hard feelings equals less stuff actually getting done because no one’s sure who’s responsible for what.

This is how the Toronto Blue Jays end up benching their only marketable player during an afternoon game on a holiday Monday. That’s synergy in action.

Eventually, the Jays will decide that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. shouldn’t participate in home playoff games because the guy who runs the CompuStat6000 told the Advanced Baseball Activities Working Group that Guerrero performs best on the road if he’s has 48 hours of sleep between outings.

If one person had been in charge, Guerrero would have played. Since a dozen get a say, no one bothered fixing a fixable problem.

Sports is a place where democracy doesn’t work (sort of like Alabama). A well-run sports organization is a benevolent dictatorship. Or, barring that, a passively malign one.

You’re reminded of that watching the Toronto Raptors. This team functions because one person is definitively in charge – club president Masai Ujiri. Even the owners don’t have as much juice as he does.

Ujiri doesn’t need to tell people what to do. They just know to do it. He keeps his circle small. Everybody in it is one of his guys (though they are not all guys).

This is why every time you hear that Ujiri is headed to some team with more stateside profile – the New York Knicks, the Washington Wizards, the Los Angeles Lakers – you should treat that report with deep suspicion.

Ujiri prizes control. He has it in Toronto. He would not in L.A., where a passel of sibling owners and their respective hangers-on are wrestling over the family inheritance.

Now that Johnson has put the Lakers’ current GM, Rob Pelinka, into the media-targeting apparatus, we should soon be hearing another round of “Masai to Hollywood” talk.

Down south, they’ll all say something like, “Who could turn down this job? Turning a storied franchise around?”

Up here, we’ve finally figured out that storied franchises (and non-storied ones) go down the tubes because they are rotten at their core. It takes a village of idiots to sink a sports team. And once the village collapses, the idiots often remain in charge.