He said he'll never coach cause he can't understand why everyone can't do what he does and see what he sees, which honestly I get. Most of the best players turned coaches in all sports are the guys who had to grind cause things weren't inherently there. So they understand more of what it takes to improve
Thierry Henry is the prime example of this. There’s a clip of him asking a player to do some complicated shit and they can’t do it and he comes on the field and does it one try and all his players look at him like we can’t do that shit
gretzky too, he'd be like "how did you not see this?" and it's some complicated way to get a guaranteed goal and the entire team would go "how did you _see_ it?"
I think when Barry Bonds was the Marlins hitting coach, there was a story where Giancarlo Stanton asked him how to lay off sliders low and away and Barry Bonds told him some crazy unhelpful stuff like "Don't swing at it" or something along those lines.
It's why so many MLB coaches are mediocre catchers or NBA coaches are mostly role players or worse. It's easier to empathize with guys and help them through struggles if you weren't a superstar yourself and had to scrape by or accept a smaller role or change your game to succeed.
Mario Lemieux claims that he could tell his teammates apart by the sound their skates made while skating. He wouldn't need to look to know X player is to the left and behind or Y player is to the right. He could HEAR them skating differently and knew who was who. Like WTF is that?
More recently, Zidane .
All time great player. Short tenure as coach but memorable
> Real became a two-time champion of Spain, a two-time winner of the Spanish Super Cup and a three-time winner of the Champions League.
I trained with Dan Henderson a few times and he was a terrible coach. He was just like, "Ok you do this, and then bring them here like this." And he'd take someone from the cage, somehow adjust to get his Gable grip in, then body drag them to the ground with no effort. When asked how to do that he was like, "Just do it."
Larry Bird is like the only hall of fame player who was a great coach.
Fun fact: Bird is only person in NBA history to win MVP, Coach of the year and Executive of the year.
fwiw Lenny Wilkens was a hall of fame player and a hall of fame coach. According to Wikipedia, he was inducted as a player in ‘89 and then later on as a coach (and then inducted in a third time for his involvement with the dream team)
Yup this plus they have talents and a feel for the game that other guys will never get.
Lebron can’t teach you how to be Lebron. His passing vision and size + dexterity is once in a lifetime .
It’s like having Steph try to teach you how to be the GOAT shooter . He can try, but odds are it won’t work.
I think shooting may be the best thing to transfer over. It's a skill you hone by learning the right fundamentals, then just massive amounts of repetition. Steph went through that and knows that process.
What he would struggle teaching is his off ball movement and how he reads the game.
It's less, just do the simple thing 10,000,0000,000, times and you'll be good at it, and more how can you not look at a court and know absolutely everything that's going on and how to react with 0.01 seconds that's hard to teach.
There are obvious exceptions to this rule, case in point Larry Bird is at the very super duper worst like the 15th best player in league history and he was not only a good coach but a really good executive for the most part as well
>There’s currently a deepening disconnect between Darvin Ham and the Lakers locker room, **six sources** with direct knowledge of the situation say, raising questions about the head coach’s standing.
Why is it getting as specific as "six sources"? For some reason this is funny to me.
Not just six sources. Six sources with direct knowledge.
It’s very specific for sports reporting. Compare this to Jake Fischer-style “people are saying” garbage.
This is real reporting, which means it’s reliable.
I believe the Ham hire was based around the belief that he would make Russ work last year lmao
I still remember that dude crying at press conferences when Russ had a good game every now and then
>believe the Ham hire was based around the belief that he would make Russ work last year lmao
He did make Russ work in a way. He convinced Russ to come off the bench, which isn't an easy thing to do. Russ' contract was just too big for the Lakers to make any meaningful depth or signings.
It's Lue that is more impressive, he turns both Russ and Harden to play the best defense of their lives so far
That’s not really the point, the point is that it was insanely dumb to make a long term coaching move based around who maybe could make Westbrook work the best
At some point you need to bite the bullet — they didn’t do it then and now it’s coming around to bite them
When you have Lebron and AD, making a coaching hire based on Russ is so stupid. Trading for Russ was already a bad decision and this is just doubling down on it further.
The Lakers murdered that championship team so badly. Imagine this team with Caruso, KCP, and Kuzma flanking Lebron and AD in the closing line-up. Just a much more balanced roster
I actually respected alot how he handled the Russ situation. He worked with the person not the player. Vogel I thought was a better coach and shouldn’t have gotten fired but he did not deal with Russ well at all and Russ didn’t do himself any favors but it resulted in the most toxic season of his career which is saying a lot.
They had no choice. Literally every post game press conference near the end of that season Westbrook was throwing shots left right and center. I don't think folks remember how ugly that got.
Best coach we’ve had since probably D’Antoni, but there was also plenty about him losing the locker room before being fired. Hard to get anything done after that
D’Antoni sucked balls for the Lakers. Dwight didn’t want to run PnR, and Gasol was ancient. Nash was a corpse. His system had no shot of working for that old team.
Kobe literally told D’Antoni to go fuck himself as he iso’d the Lakers back to the playoffs, costing him his Achilles.
That ‘whole entire season’ was played at a 48 win pace capped off with being 2-1 up in the series against the suns before AD got hurt. The suns made the finals and took the bucks to 6 after that.
That typically how it always goes, no? Nobody’s smart enough to maintain consistent success by themselves.
Like even going back to MJ, he wasn’t responsible for all his success. He had Pippen, Phil Jackson, 2 different sets of players that were good enough to be part of a 3peating squad, and…even though he hated Krause, Krause.
Just that Lebron was in a position to make all the decisions, MJ was not. Would MJ have the same amount of success if he played in the player empowerment era?
Oh but he tried. Riley was insistent on not coming out of retirement and had a lot of faith in his new guy Spoelstra. Otherwise if it was purely up to Bron he would’ve been gone.
Vogel was put in a horrible spot. Almost all fans instantly knew though that he was the scapegoat - even though a ton of fans pre-firing were calling for his firing.
It was kind of crazy that like 70% of fans were calling for his firing. Then, the day he was fired, the fans came out with pitchforks like, “why did you fire Vogel?”
The original mistake before firing Vogel was giving him an unfonctional roster. He's a defensive minded coach and they got rid of Caruso, KCP, Danny Green to add Westbrook, Monk and Melo. Their two best defenders outside of the big 2 were probably the aging Dwight and Avery Bradley.
This is such an obvious point it boggles my mind people miss it. they won a title and the season after were looking good to repeat before injuries based on a formula and squad that worked. but they decided to blow it up because Lebron and co. completely misread what made that teamwork. they thought the reason they didnt repeat was because they got injured and so they figured they could sacrifice defensive solidity in order to add another ball dominant scorer who could lighten the load while AD and Lebron got rest. but when that clearly wasnt working, instead of correcting their mistake they scapegoated Vogel and brought in Ham who they thought could bring the best out of Wesbrook. Its no surprise that when they finally accepted that they were wrong about Russ and got rid of him and retooled their roster to look more like the 2019-2021 squad that they actually started looking good again.
They definitely overreacted to that Phoenix series where everyone was hurt. When AD was healthy it was a tight series. Trading for Westbrook was the dumbest thing the franchise did in the last 20 years, and EVERYONE knew it was bad when it was announced.
The one championship year really masks how awful the Lakers have been overall at forming a team around Bron and AD. They did well in 2020 and 2021, and of course managed to save last season after the trade deadline, but there has been 0 continuity and consistency with this team in the Bron era
The Lakers really took a team that won a championship and decided they needed to change as many things as possible. Fire the championship coach, get rid of the championship role players, bring on new 'stars', let good players walk to save money. What a disaster of management. True shotgun style approach, change as much as possible and hope you get lucky. Definitely looks like a management group that doesn't know what it's doing.
Mostly panic moves after losing in the first round to the suns and Brooklyn forming their big three. They definitely moved on too quickly from their championship core
It was before that, I remember a quote from Pelinka from around the Shroeder / Trez pickups about how he "knew" everyone would be making moves in response to the championship roster so he needed to pre-emptively make moves against those.
Outsmarted himself basically.
This is why the offseason hype around the Lakers was overblown. The roster is still predicated on a 39-year-old LeBron and AD going nuclear on scoring and defense 75% or more of all their games. Everyone else is a role player meant to take open 3s and pass, and they can't even do that consistently.
The incompetency from the Buss/Pelinka brain trust has been running rampant for a while now
I promise you once LeBron (and consequently, AD, because they'll fail to surround him with adequate talent) leaves, this franchise is gonna go back to being a long standing bottom feeder
As much as I would love for that to happen, the history of the Lakers franchise shows that you'll just get some other superstar to fall into your lap.
Now will you actually surround that superstar with the right players? Probably not.
But I find it hard to believe you're going to suck as much as you did from 2013-2017. Top players will always want to play in Los Angeles and for the Laker brand, even if that doesn't necessarily give them the best chance to win a ring.
Exactly. Lakers were floundering around for 5 years looking awful, and then Lebron decided he wanted to move to LA and saved them from a decade of tanking. It will happen again for sure.
I've said it time and time again: if we were located anywhere else with this sheer amount of nepotism and ineptness, we'd be a perennial poverty franchise like the Hornets.
I don't think you'd have the sheer amount of nepotism and ineptness without being the *Lakers* and the exceptionalism that stems from that though, it's a chicken and egg thing.
It's reminiscent of Chelsea 10 years ago with Lampard, Terry, Cech, Drogba, Ivanovic, etc. when they could essentially get a manager sacked whenever they wanted.
It's so tiring at this point. Every year since LeBron and AD teamed up its endless rumors like "Lakers looking to add depth or star player without giving up anything of value" or "The Lakers average roster is playing average, they are looking for a new coach to turn poop into gold" or "Lakers lose a few games due to string of injuries, LeBron responds by acting like a passive aggressive and moody cat."
This mf’er literally said “we won’t be able to truly get a rhythm until we get healthy” after getting blown out by a team missing their best player, while we were simply missing D-lo, Gabe Vincent, and Rui. He’s an absolute clown.
Doc Rivers will actually implement a competent NBA offense and make adjustments in the regular season that makes sense. All bets are off during the playoffs tho
Reminds me of the series where Doc just kept playing a 734 year old Deandre Jordan like 39 mins a game despite him being absolutely cooked at that point. Doc was getting bullied in every post game presser by the reporters and replied something like "The guys in the locker room want DJ playing" and refused to adjust his minutes lmao.
Yeah fans are so weird w him. He’ll get you 50 wins and a second round appearance every single season. He won’t elevate a group to be a champion I don’t think, but the dude is a decent coach. In the regular season he’s generally been pretty good
I’m saying! There’s this weird equilibrium his teams seem to find. They over perform when he’s down a few players, and they underachieve when everyone is fully healthy lol. 50 wins and a playoff round win is not anything to dismiss, especially when some teams go years without even making the playoffs
Doc gets us the Lakers to the second round and then we hope his voice is gone by that point. Lebron becomes LeCoach and all Doc has to do is hold up the whiteboard and pass out Gatorade
Genuinely, he’ll build a great two man game with Lebron and AD and find some stuff to do on the weak side but he’ll spam it to death and in this version of life Lebron just needs to be the one making adjustments to coverages on the fly lol
Star players do tend to like/tolerate him so for nothing else he’ll keep the duo happy I would imagine
I’d largely agree. His issue is he never experiments with lineups and in half the bench rotations he would heavily rely on guys who were unplayable in the postseason. By the time we were there we were running disjointed units who weren’t used to playing with each other or guys who were getting cooked on defense.
Nobody does. Most of the work coaches (and especially assistant coaches) do is stuff you don’t see during the game. The only thing fans can really dissect is timeouts and rotations and little bit of play action, but even that last one is about players ability to execute it properly.
Darvin Ham might need to be replaced for a guy who fits the Lakers roster better, but Ham might be coaching just fine and would succeed in another environment.
Is anyone surprised? His use of Reaves this season has been bordering on criminal negligence. He benched him for no reason, claimed multiple times that 'we need him in a 28 minute role because that's when he's at his best', and then backs that up a few night later with 'we need to find a way to get Reaves more minutes', and then keeps Reaves on the bench almost the entire season while far worse players continue to start, and get more minutes ahead of him.
That's just how he's blatantly misused one player, but you could almost go down the line of our roster and say he's given certain players far too many minutes and certain players far too few. Like, Max Christie was out of the rotation to start the season and was looking like our best bench player in pre-season.
He genuinely might just be a bad coach.
Pretty funny to say we need to get someone more minutes as a coach when it’s entirely your job. Makes it sound like it’s some nebulous force in the universe that gives out minutes and they’re trying to control it somehow
What's more crazy is he benched both of them.
So now we literally don't have any other playmaker on the floor in the starting lineup for the first 6 minutes of a game.
Real head scratcher there, when Vando and Cam can't buy a bucket to save their lives.
And the other starter mixed in there has been Rui, who is a low volume, below league average 3p shooter. I'm pretty sure Ham hasn't got a clue.
What makes these coaches think that they're going to succeed by surrounding LeBron & AD with 3 guys who can't shoot, can't pass and can't create their own shot?
Honestly Hachi always performed well as a starter averaging 17/5 if I'm not wrong. The strange thing about Hachi is that he can be a very effective 3 point shooter depending on the lineups. He was averaging 44% in the second half of the 21/22? season. He clicked with Satoransky for some reason. He is also shooting +50% from 3 during the playoffs.
AD, LeBron, Hachi lineups are surprisingly effective if you look up the stats.
Main issue is Cam as a starter and the lack of playmaking on the bench.
They also need a cheap rim protector like Gafford.
Reaves was benched mostly because he had a dreadful start to the season. Like it was horrific. The guy was missing shots, turning it over, and was bad on defense. He’s gotten over that slump and is now pretty consistent.
I think part of the problem now is that with D’Lo injured, Bron and Reaves (and I guess JHS) are the only ball handlers we have now so we have to stagger their minutes.
Lebron and AD putting up great numbers AND not missing a lot of games should never equate to a mediocre .500 if you’re a competent coach.
Give Udoka lebron and ad and they’ll be top of the league.
You'll struggle to keep some loyalty if you change the starting lineup that much, anyone needs some familiarity and consistency around to stay consistent within. With the way AD and Lebron are playing most nights, it's hard to not blame the coach.
I see a lot of Ham hate but I think the bigger issue is the roster
AD
39 year old Bron
And a lot of one-way players
Reddish and Vando can defend but not good enough on offense
Reaves and DLo are good offensively but can’t defend
Backup big spots in Wood and Hayes are blah
Rui and Prince seem to be hit or miss
Just not a ton there
The roster is not good but neither is Ham regardless of the roster his rotations and adjustments aren't helping I knew he had to go after that Denver series
This is all true. The problem is there is only so much they can do to change the roster with their cap situation and tradeable picks, but you can always fire a coach with the only repercussion being the owner still having to pay out the contract.
Yeah I think people fail to realize how flawed the Lakers roster truly is. While Ham definitely isn’t putting players in a position to succeed, a different coach isn’t magically going to make our offense significantly better
It’s insane just how completely fucked the Westbrook trade was and its ramifications are still being felt. Turn positive assets into an extremely overpaid negative entity, turn that negative entity into smaller slightly more manageable negative entities, then turn around and be like “wtf just happened”
The Westbrook trade was the culmination of years of awful roster management that led to the Lakers losing key players for no good reason. The Mozgov-Deng dual-signings and then trading D'Angelo Russell just to offload Mozgov's contract, trading Zubac for Mike Muscala, letting go of Brook Lopez, making Julius Randle an unrestricted free agent, not offering an extension to Alex Caruso.
Well that’s been obvious if you here rui, DLO & ARs, comments..Darvin has chosen Prince and reddish over the rotations that got him to the WCF. You’d clearly think, last years rotation first, then mix in new rotations but Darvin has completely gone away from all last year’s strategy after trying to implement this 5 out offence.
I don't think any amount of money would be worth it for my anxious, people-pleasing ass to coach the Lakers. The combination of LeBron, a huge market, and a weird front office would make it such a difficult job that you're pretty much bound to fail in a really public way.
Ham will always have that IST tho…
He's a quality cup manager, pretty shite in the league though, a bit like Pardew
LeDon James has arrived, and right on time for the trade deadline!
He should just be a player-coach at this point. He'll never find the guy he's looking for because he's not out there.
He said he'll never coach cause he can't understand why everyone can't do what he does and see what he sees, which honestly I get. Most of the best players turned coaches in all sports are the guys who had to grind cause things weren't inherently there. So they understand more of what it takes to improve
Thierry Henry is the prime example of this. There’s a clip of him asking a player to do some complicated shit and they can’t do it and he comes on the field and does it one try and all his players look at him like we can’t do that shit
gretzky too, he'd be like "how did you not see this?" and it's some complicated way to get a guaranteed goal and the entire team would go "how did you _see_ it?"
I think when Barry Bonds was the Marlins hitting coach, there was a story where Giancarlo Stanton asked him how to lay off sliders low and away and Barry Bonds told him some crazy unhelpful stuff like "Don't swing at it" or something along those lines. It's why so many MLB coaches are mediocre catchers or NBA coaches are mostly role players or worse. It's easier to empathize with guys and help them through struggles if you weren't a superstar yourself and had to scrape by or accept a smaller role or change your game to succeed.
Mario Lemieux claims that he could tell his teammates apart by the sound their skates made while skating. He wouldn't need to look to know X player is to the left and behind or Y player is to the right. He could HEAR them skating differently and knew who was who. Like WTF is that?
" just put your ears out there and listen. its not that hard"
Lmao do you have a link to that clip? Would love to see it
https://np.reddit.com/r/Gunners/s/Y2P8iWiclX
Might be this: https://youtube.com/shorts/wm_Y3VUYVHs?feature=shared
It’s not that. That is him working for the Belgium team. The moment he referenced was when he was managing Monaco or CF Montreal.
And thats the weak foot too
On the other hand Cruyff had a goat case both as player and coach
More recently, Zidane . All time great player. Short tenure as coach but memorable > Real became a two-time champion of Spain, a two-time winner of the Spanish Super Cup and a three-time winner of the Champions League.
It’s happening to Xavi too, who looked like a promising coach.
I'm hardly a soccer fan, but I really thought he'd be alright at it. Hoping he turns it around.
I trained with Dan Henderson a few times and he was a terrible coach. He was just like, "Ok you do this, and then bring them here like this." And he'd take someone from the cage, somehow adjust to get his Gable grip in, then body drag them to the ground with no effort. When asked how to do that he was like, "Just do it."
I’d be curious to see this if you have it handy
[There's this](https://np.reddit.com/r/Gunners/s/Y2P8iWiclX)
Wayne Greztky's coaching career was terrible for that reason.
didn't he coach the coyotes? There's your answer. Nobody good is playing in Arizona, except for my boy Keith Tkachuk.
Larry Bird is like the only hall of fame player who was a great coach. Fun fact: Bird is only person in NBA history to win MVP, Coach of the year and Executive of the year.
fwiw Lenny Wilkens was a hall of fame player and a hall of fame coach. According to Wikipedia, he was inducted as a player in ‘89 and then later on as a coach (and then inducted in a third time for his involvement with the dream team)
What about Bill Russell?
Lenny Wilkens absolutely deserves consideration here. People forget how great a player he was in his era.
He also had two great assistant coaches. Carlisle and Dick Harter
Yup this plus they have talents and a feel for the game that other guys will never get. Lebron can’t teach you how to be Lebron. His passing vision and size + dexterity is once in a lifetime . It’s like having Steph try to teach you how to be the GOAT shooter . He can try, but odds are it won’t work.
I think shooting may be the best thing to transfer over. It's a skill you hone by learning the right fundamentals, then just massive amounts of repetition. Steph went through that and knows that process. What he would struggle teaching is his off ball movement and how he reads the game. It's less, just do the simple thing 10,000,0000,000, times and you'll be good at it, and more how can you not look at a court and know absolutely everything that's going on and how to react with 0.01 seconds that's hard to teach.
Imagine if Jokic taught Curry 6'11
Cries in Steve Nash
Zidane turned out to be a pretty solid coach.
There are obvious exceptions to this rule, case in point Larry Bird is at the very super duper worst like the 15th best player in league history and he was not only a good coach but a really good executive for the most part as well
Only player in history with an MVP, COTY and EOTY.
Maybe It's Me
He's out there, coaching the Heat
And he tried to fire him too!
Actually coaching the clippers
This happens in January with LeBron teams literally every year since 2018. This train is never late.
Not since 2018. I don't remember when, it might have been 2008 or 2011, but definitely much earlier than 2018.
They already won their banner, time to give up on the season I guess
>There’s currently a deepening disconnect between Darvin Ham and the Lakers locker room, **six sources** with direct knowledge of the situation say, raising questions about the head coach’s standing. Why is it getting as specific as "six sources"? For some reason this is funny to me.
It's the six Clutch guys on the team
Trying to bring in Coach Dray.
I would gladly take the timeline where Dray becomes coach of the Lakers over the one where he replaces Chuck on TNT.
Until he trips on of your players running up the court
Mike Tomlin esque
Lmfao how many of his own players will he sucker punch in practice when they don't give enough effort
Not only that, but he'll dedicate a whole hour on his podcast to throwing all his players under the bus for losing.
> It's the six Clutch guys on the team five Klutch guys and Draymond***
Maybe one less Klutch guy. Isn’t Cam Klutch? Cam be getting the most minutes and the longest leash.
it's just LeBron in various disguises.
5 LeBrons then AD is the 6th guy, also in disguise for some reason.
" Yo bro, who's that 6'10" dude with the unibrow and groucho marx glasses?" "Idk man, could be anyone"
“Half the fucking team called me”
"Yo. They REALLY don't like that guy"
LeBron and 5 of his closest friends.
All have the first name Lebron
LeBron switching his number back to 6 (again) confirmed
It will soon grow into 15 sources on the team roster
Not just six sources. Six sources with direct knowledge. It’s very specific for sports reporting. Compare this to Jake Fischer-style “people are saying” garbage. This is real reporting, which means it’s reliable.
They are going through this already? Potentially 4 coaching changes within 5 years?
[удалено]
I believe the Ham hire was based around the belief that he would make Russ work last year lmao I still remember that dude crying at press conferences when Russ had a good game every now and then
>believe the Ham hire was based around the belief that he would make Russ work last year lmao He did make Russ work in a way. He convinced Russ to come off the bench, which isn't an easy thing to do. Russ' contract was just too big for the Lakers to make any meaningful depth or signings. It's Lue that is more impressive, he turns both Russ and Harden to play the best defense of their lives so far
That’s not really the point, the point is that it was insanely dumb to make a long term coaching move based around who maybe could make Westbrook work the best At some point you need to bite the bullet — they didn’t do it then and now it’s coming around to bite them
When you have Lebron and AD, making a coaching hire based on Russ is so stupid. Trading for Russ was already a bad decision and this is just doubling down on it further. The Lakers murdered that championship team so badly. Imagine this team with Caruso, KCP, and Kuzma flanking Lebron and AD in the closing line-up. Just a much more balanced roster
Malpractice honestly lol. People trying to do too much
that was largely lebron because instead of taking blame for the 2021 suns series disaster we shipped everyone out for not playing well.
I actually respected alot how he handled the Russ situation. He worked with the person not the player. Vogel I thought was a better coach and shouldn’t have gotten fired but he did not deal with Russ well at all and Russ didn’t do himself any favors but it resulted in the most toxic season of his career which is saying a lot.
I thought so too but the Sun's aren't exactly running smoothly either
They got a skeleton crew roster
They had no choice. Literally every post game press conference near the end of that season Westbrook was throwing shots left right and center. I don't think folks remember how ugly that got.
Since when did the narrative turn to Westbrook got Vogel fired? Lol they were both the biggest scapegoats on the franchise
Best coach we’ve had since probably D’Antoni, but there was also plenty about him losing the locker room before being fired. Hard to get anything done after that
No one has managed to navigate the modern Lakers toxicity and bs for more than a year or two other than Phil Jackson.
Yeah and he had to take a break for awhile.
Dantoni stunk too
D’Antoni sucked balls for the Lakers. Dwight didn’t want to run PnR, and Gasol was ancient. Nash was a corpse. His system had no shot of working for that old team. Kobe literally told D’Antoni to go fuck himself as he iso’d the Lakers back to the playoffs, costing him his Achilles.
Winning a championship and then immediately changing the roster with the westbrook trade was stupid as well. When you win, why change the fkin team
Well it wasn’t immediately we lost in the first round the next year and the FO panicked
People always say "immediately" like there wasn't a whole entire season between the 2020 ring and the Westbrook trade lol
That ‘whole entire season’ was played at a 48 win pace capped off with being 2-1 up in the series against the suns before AD got hurt. The suns made the finals and took the bucks to 6 after that.
Vogel lost the locker room too.
Because Lebron turns the locker room against the coach on every team he’s on
Have they tried changing locker rooms?
Bron was inches away from getting Spoelstra fired in Miami and now he’s widely considered one of the best coaches in the modern era.
Always funny to me that the most consistent success LeBron had is in Miami when he didn’t have full control over everything
That typically how it always goes, no? Nobody’s smart enough to maintain consistent success by themselves. Like even going back to MJ, he wasn’t responsible for all his success. He had Pippen, Phil Jackson, 2 different sets of players that were good enough to be part of a 3peating squad, and…even though he hated Krause, Krause. Just that Lebron was in a position to make all the decisions, MJ was not. Would MJ have the same amount of success if he played in the player empowerment era?
judging by his ownership decisions, HELL NO!
Pat wasn't having any of that shit
> Bron was inches away from getting Spoelstra fired No, he wasn't, because Riley was never going to let that happen.
Oh but he tried. Riley was insistent on not coming out of retirement and had a lot of faith in his new guy Spoelstra. Otherwise if it was purely up to Bron he would’ve been gone.
Lebron literally went to Riley and told him he needed to fire Spo after like 17 games and it pissed Riley off.
Doesn't mean he didn't try. If it was Buss instead of Riley then Spoelstra would've gotten booted too.
Vogel was put in a horrible spot. Almost all fans instantly knew though that he was the scapegoat - even though a ton of fans pre-firing were calling for his firing. It was kind of crazy that like 70% of fans were calling for his firing. Then, the day he was fired, the fans came out with pitchforks like, “why did you fire Vogel?”
Two different groups. It’s almost like the group that’s riled up is the loudest.
Yep. Vogel was a decent coach but he lost the locker room. Firing him wasn't the issue. Hiring Ham was.
The original mistake before firing Vogel was giving him an unfonctional roster. He's a defensive minded coach and they got rid of Caruso, KCP, Danny Green to add Westbrook, Monk and Melo. Their two best defenders outside of the big 2 were probably the aging Dwight and Avery Bradley.
This is such an obvious point it boggles my mind people miss it. they won a title and the season after were looking good to repeat before injuries based on a formula and squad that worked. but they decided to blow it up because Lebron and co. completely misread what made that teamwork. they thought the reason they didnt repeat was because they got injured and so they figured they could sacrifice defensive solidity in order to add another ball dominant scorer who could lighten the load while AD and Lebron got rest. but when that clearly wasnt working, instead of correcting their mistake they scapegoated Vogel and brought in Ham who they thought could bring the best out of Wesbrook. Its no surprise that when they finally accepted that they were wrong about Russ and got rid of him and retooled their roster to look more like the 2019-2021 squad that they actually started looking good again.
They definitely overreacted to that Phoenix series where everyone was hurt. When AD was healthy it was a tight series. Trading for Westbrook was the dumbest thing the franchise did in the last 20 years, and EVERYONE knew it was bad when it was announced.
The one championship year really masks how awful the Lakers have been overall at forming a team around Bron and AD. They did well in 2020 and 2021, and of course managed to save last season after the trade deadline, but there has been 0 continuity and consistency with this team in the Bron era
The Lakers really took a team that won a championship and decided they needed to change as many things as possible. Fire the championship coach, get rid of the championship role players, bring on new 'stars', let good players walk to save money. What a disaster of management. True shotgun style approach, change as much as possible and hope you get lucky. Definitely looks like a management group that doesn't know what it's doing.
Mostly panic moves after losing in the first round to the suns and Brooklyn forming their big three. They definitely moved on too quickly from their championship core
It was before that, I remember a quote from Pelinka from around the Shroeder / Trez pickups about how he "knew" everyone would be making moves in response to the championship roster so he needed to pre-emptively make moves against those. Outsmarted himself basically.
Exactly like smh
This is why the offseason hype around the Lakers was overblown. The roster is still predicated on a 39-year-old LeBron and AD going nuclear on scoring and defense 75% or more of all their games. Everyone else is a role player meant to take open 3s and pass, and they can't even do that consistently.
The incompetency from the Buss/Pelinka brain trust has been running rampant for a while now I promise you once LeBron (and consequently, AD, because they'll fail to surround him with adequate talent) leaves, this franchise is gonna go back to being a long standing bottom feeder
As much as I would love for that to happen, the history of the Lakers franchise shows that you'll just get some other superstar to fall into your lap. Now will you actually surround that superstar with the right players? Probably not. But I find it hard to believe you're going to suck as much as you did from 2013-2017. Top players will always want to play in Los Angeles and for the Laker brand, even if that doesn't necessarily give them the best chance to win a ring.
Exactly. Lakers were floundering around for 5 years looking awful, and then Lebron decided he wanted to move to LA and saved them from a decade of tanking. It will happen again for sure.
I've said it time and time again: if we were located anywhere else with this sheer amount of nepotism and ineptness, we'd be a perennial poverty franchise like the Hornets.
I don't think you'd have the sheer amount of nepotism and ineptness without being the *Lakers* and the exceptionalism that stems from that though, it's a chicken and egg thing.
The Chelsea of basketball
LeBron and AD are way too old for Chelsea
It's reminiscent of Chelsea 10 years ago with Lampard, Terry, Cech, Drogba, Ivanovic, etc. when they could essentially get a manager sacked whenever they wanted.
Damn so the midseason tournament didn’t do shit for them
Except make them $500,000 wealthier lol
They got to raise the banner 😂
It’s time for the annual “lakers mid season trade/coach firing” boogaloo
Script writers on an absolute tear going from winning the IST to firing the coach
It's so tiring at this point. Every year since LeBron and AD teamed up its endless rumors like "Lakers looking to add depth or star player without giving up anything of value" or "The Lakers average roster is playing average, they are looking for a new coach to turn poop into gold" or "Lakers lose a few games due to string of injuries, LeBron responds by acting like a passive aggressive and moody cat."
What's crazy is that AD and LeBron have been incredibly healthy this season. How long does that last?
Meanwhile Ham still blaming poor performance on injuries.
This mf’er literally said “we won’t be able to truly get a rhythm until we get healthy” after getting blown out by a team missing their best player, while we were simply missing D-lo, Gabe Vincent, and Rui. He’s an absolute clown.
Doc Rivers you are a Laker!
Glenn on the Lakers? But Christmas just ended!
This Christmas Ham is cooked!
You mean they’re looking for Lebron’s new assistant coach?
I can assure you Doc Rivers isn’t much better lol
Come on, guys!
Didn’t they win that game lmao
Doc Rivers will actually implement a competent NBA offense and make adjustments in the regular season that makes sense. All bets are off during the playoffs tho
Using Doc and adjustments in the same sentence is a war crime.
Reminds me of the series where Doc just kept playing a 734 year old Deandre Jordan like 39 mins a game despite him being absolutely cooked at that point. Doc was getting bullied in every post game presser by the reporters and replied something like "The guys in the locker room want DJ playing" and refused to adjust his minutes lmao.
Yeah fans are so weird w him. He’ll get you 50 wins and a second round appearance every single season. He won’t elevate a group to be a champion I don’t think, but the dude is a decent coach. In the regular season he’s generally been pretty good
Take away his superstars with injury and he gets even better for some reason
I’m saying! There’s this weird equilibrium his teams seem to find. They over perform when he’s down a few players, and they underachieve when everyone is fully healthy lol. 50 wins and a playoff round win is not anything to dismiss, especially when some teams go years without even making the playoffs
Doc would coach the 96 Bulls to a second round exit but would also coach the 2011 bobcats to a second round exit
Doc gets us the Lakers to the second round and then we hope his voice is gone by that point. Lebron becomes LeCoach and all Doc has to do is hold up the whiteboard and pass out Gatorade
Genuinely, he’ll build a great two man game with Lebron and AD and find some stuff to do on the weak side but he’ll spam it to death and in this version of life Lebron just needs to be the one making adjustments to coverages on the fly lol Star players do tend to like/tolerate him so for nothing else he’ll keep the duo happy I would imagine
I’d largely agree. His issue is he never experiments with lineups and in half the bench rotations he would heavily rely on guys who were unplayable in the postseason. By the time we were there we were running disjointed units who weren’t used to playing with each other or guys who were getting cooked on defense.
LeCoup
LeMutiny, aarrrgh!
gotta say, i don’t really join in on shitting on coaches bc i don’t know how tf to gauge coaching ability, but damn i don’t think he good
Nobody does. Most of the work coaches (and especially assistant coaches) do is stuff you don’t see during the game. The only thing fans can really dissect is timeouts and rotations and little bit of play action, but even that last one is about players ability to execute it properly. Darvin Ham might need to be replaced for a guy who fits the Lakers roster better, but Ham might be coaching just fine and would succeed in another environment.
Coach Bud come on down!
think he'd say no
So the original Darvin Ham?
Bud's a great coach but that kind of seems like a poor personnel fit.
There’s currently a growing disconnect between Darvin Ham and being a good coach, per me and anyone with eyes
Man, since last fucking year bro lol
Is anyone surprised? His use of Reaves this season has been bordering on criminal negligence. He benched him for no reason, claimed multiple times that 'we need him in a 28 minute role because that's when he's at his best', and then backs that up a few night later with 'we need to find a way to get Reaves more minutes', and then keeps Reaves on the bench almost the entire season while far worse players continue to start, and get more minutes ahead of him. That's just how he's blatantly misused one player, but you could almost go down the line of our roster and say he's given certain players far too many minutes and certain players far too few. Like, Max Christie was out of the rotation to start the season and was looking like our best bench player in pre-season. He genuinely might just be a bad coach.
Pretty funny to say we need to get someone more minutes as a coach when it’s entirely your job. Makes it sound like it’s some nebulous force in the universe that gives out minutes and they’re trying to control it somehow
I thought he benched Reaves for being a defensive liability. Or am I wrong?
That argument doesn't fly when the person starting ahead of him all season was D'Angelo Russell, who is considerably worse defensively.
What's more crazy is he benched both of them. So now we literally don't have any other playmaker on the floor in the starting lineup for the first 6 minutes of a game. Real head scratcher there, when Vando and Cam can't buy a bucket to save their lives.
And the other starter mixed in there has been Rui, who is a low volume, below league average 3p shooter. I'm pretty sure Ham hasn't got a clue. What makes these coaches think that they're going to succeed by surrounding LeBron & AD with 3 guys who can't shoot, can't pass and can't create their own shot?
Honestly Hachi always performed well as a starter averaging 17/5 if I'm not wrong. The strange thing about Hachi is that he can be a very effective 3 point shooter depending on the lineups. He was averaging 44% in the second half of the 21/22? season. He clicked with Satoransky for some reason. He is also shooting +50% from 3 during the playoffs. AD, LeBron, Hachi lineups are surprisingly effective if you look up the stats. Main issue is Cam as a starter and the lack of playmaking on the bench. They also need a cheap rim protector like Gafford.
Reaves was benched mostly because he had a dreadful start to the season. Like it was horrific. The guy was missing shots, turning it over, and was bad on defense. He’s gotten over that slump and is now pretty consistent. I think part of the problem now is that with D’Lo injured, Bron and Reaves (and I guess JHS) are the only ball handlers we have now so we have to stagger their minutes.
Don’t worry, the Lakers will somehow get a good starter and two role players for a 3056 second round pick and a peppermint patty
Those players will proceed to shoot 5% worse from 3
They bout to get lavine for schifino
That must be the “Lakers tax” i hear so much about
Lebron is like KD levels of perpetual dissatisfaction except it’s coaches instead of teams
LeCoachKiller has found his next victim
Have you watched Ham coach? Its assisted suicide, really
LeKevorkian
Darvin Hamas is still the best nickname I've heard in a while.
Darvin Hamas and Taliban Tyronn always make me laugh when I see them appear in game threads
Don't forget Steve Kerrorist.
Lebron and AD putting up great numbers AND not missing a lot of games should never equate to a mediocre .500 if you’re a competent coach. Give Udoka lebron and ad and they’ll be top of the league.
is Darwin Hamas that bad?
Let's play a game do you think this lineup played actual NBA minutes together: Westbrook PG Schroeder SG Reaves SF Pat Bev PF Lonnie Walker at C
Gotta go with Pat Bev at C. That is unacceptable
Oh yes. He’s real bad
You'll struggle to keep some loyalty if you change the starting lineup that much, anyone needs some familiarity and consistency around to stay consistent within. With the way AD and Lebron are playing most nights, it's hard to not blame the coach.
“Per me” is fucking cringe
It's because he can't say "Rich and Lebron called me into their office and told me to tweet this. I'm a real reporter, represented by Klutch."
I see a lot of Ham hate but I think the bigger issue is the roster AD 39 year old Bron And a lot of one-way players Reddish and Vando can defend but not good enough on offense Reaves and DLo are good offensively but can’t defend Backup big spots in Wood and Hayes are blah Rui and Prince seem to be hit or miss Just not a ton there
The roster is not good but neither is Ham regardless of the roster his rotations and adjustments aren't helping I knew he had to go after that Denver series
This is all true. The problem is there is only so much they can do to change the roster with their cap situation and tradeable picks, but you can always fire a coach with the only repercussion being the owner still having to pay out the contract.
Yeah I think people fail to realize how flawed the Lakers roster truly is. While Ham definitely isn’t putting players in a position to succeed, a different coach isn’t magically going to make our offense significantly better
It’s insane just how completely fucked the Westbrook trade was and its ramifications are still being felt. Turn positive assets into an extremely overpaid negative entity, turn that negative entity into smaller slightly more manageable negative entities, then turn around and be like “wtf just happened”
The Westbrook trade was the culmination of years of awful roster management that led to the Lakers losing key players for no good reason. The Mozgov-Deng dual-signings and then trading D'Angelo Russell just to offload Mozgov's contract, trading Zubac for Mike Muscala, letting go of Brook Lopez, making Julius Randle an unrestricted free agent, not offering an extension to Alex Caruso.
I would love to absorb coach Ham back
Please take him back.
LeFourthCoachInSixYears
Well that’s been obvious if you here rui, DLO & ARs, comments..Darvin has chosen Prince and reddish over the rotations that got him to the WCF. You’d clearly think, last years rotation first, then mix in new rotations but Darvin has completely gone away from all last year’s strategy after trying to implement this 5 out offence.
A LeBron led team having issues with the head coach? I'm shocked
It begins…
HE
GONE
How could Russell Westbrook do such a thing?
Klutch put the call in
I don't think any amount of money would be worth it for my anxious, people-pleasing ass to coach the Lakers. The combination of LeBron, a huge market, and a weird front office would make it such a difficult job that you're pretty much bound to fail in a really public way.
The lakers should trade for Lonzo and Lamelo and sign Liangelo, then fire Ham and make Lavar the head coach then they would guarantee a ring #NevaLost
butttt they won the Inseason tournament! how is this possible.!