Head Coach Discussion: Canned Ham, Who Is Our New Coach?

Dude needs to go. If it wasn't for the IST miracle (and players stepping up like they did in the bubble), i would bet some $ on him being gone this season. But as it stands now, he'll stay and we'll waste away another year of healthy Bron and AD.

 

do you have any confidence at all that ham's replacement will be an improvement? i agree he's been a downgrade from vogel. but that was supposedly impossible, right?

the bloggers want blood.

 

Nope. But im afraid he has lost the locker room. That was supposed to be his biggest (and maybe even only) strength, being "a players guy".
I don't know, maybe im just seeing things and everything will somehow work out...
Btw, Frank was always my guy.

 

Frank has the rep too, and deservedly so, of being a players’ coach. But Frank with THIS roster …. even with the same injuries and guys out exactly as we’ve had …. guaranteed would have the team consistently playing better defense. Ham’s rep is undeserved. And for a good part because he has NOT walked all the BS talk he stated over and over when he first got here. A real coach for decades, and no doubt a good one I’m personally confident …. @Toklat was the first to spot this and call it out last year.

 

trade him for monty

 

I feel that Ham's replacement would be Handy. I dont know much about him though.

 

i love handy, but what are his credentials for this particular job? he's got serious bona fides for player development, but we get killed on strategy. unless you're just basically admitting that lebron's player-coach. which, honestly...it's probably way better than lebron as player-gm.

on second second thought...i just remembered magic's coaching stint.

 

You’re not wrong, but how much worse could Handy be? Can we actually cite any strengths of Ham? Initially the idea was that he was a player coach, but there’s a lot of smoke to players being confused and it doesn’t really sound like they’re buying into his talk anymore.

I don’t think they’ll actually give Ham the axe in season and replace him with Handy, but at this point i feel fairly confident that he couldn’t be worse.

 

I think Lebron will be great as a playing coach, he already does it anyway. He could have a Bill Russell or Lenny Wilkens type success in that dual role. I think he would also be more careful with the ball as a coach and not waste possessions lol

 

Dude has a photographic memory and remembers plays and players and strategies of what has worked and what hasn’t for 2 decades. He’s like Rondo. I would be really interested to see him player / coach. To the moon interested if they brought Rajon onto the staff to scheme with in the locker room and with in game decisions. I think Bron would dig it. I think he would be good at it. That multi core CPU of his with the big load of integrated RAM could multi-task fine just 2 things . Especially that are about the same thing …. playing and coaching to win the game.

But this is pipe. Numbnuts will get at least until the end of this season.

 

no idea who the supposed improved replacement coach would be, but this has not been fun minus a decent playoff run last year. For that alone, I think he gets rope to last the season. We'll see what trades are made by the end of the year, and if this team can put together a run.

It's an absolute waste of two stars at their level to not get deep into the playoffs due to coaching or roster.

 

If Lebron agrees as player/coach maybe Rondo as 1st assistant?

 

Player coaches are now no longer allowed. I think that went out with Russell, but don't care enough to look it up. But I have read it's not allowed any longer even if we have some people who may be capable of such a role.

 

Just don’t tell anyone?

 

with all of the cameras, someone might notice

 

…. the reason? MONEY. and sneaky owners!!

“Today, the collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and the players' union prohibits the use of player-coaches, in order to avoid circumventing the league's salary cap, as coaches' salaries are not counted under the cap.”

 

I think it'd make more sense to allow it but the coach salary is predetermined and locked as long as they remain a player, after which they renegotiate if player retired and wants to continue coaching. While playing it's locked in at the average salary for a NBA coach (add them up and divide by 30), that's fair. Then all the league has to watch for is a post retirement pay spike -- earning $4m then $20m as soon as they retire... that's pretty easy to spot too. And it's not like this would be a common thing, maybe three in the league at any given time. Bron, CP, and Conley are the only current players who I could see wearing both caps.

 

If we're being realistic, the odds of Ham being fired in-season are close to zero. After humiliating Vogel with that lame-duck 2022 season after he'd won a championship, I think the FO would be very reluctant to dismiss a coach that made it to the WCF. Considering that Handy seems to have been a player development guy wherever he's coached, I suspect he wouldn't be much of an upgrade.

I really try to check myself with the "fire the coach" stuff because most fans of nearly every team hate their rotations/lineups. We also don't see any of what they see in practice, so there's an entire data set coaches use that we don't have access to. But the lineup decisions and even some of the schematic stuff that Ham has been doing since the IST has just been strange. I'll keep stressing this point; continuity was supposed to be a big strength coming into this season. The players themselves seemed excited to continue the trajectory they'd been on post trade deadline last season. I was in favor of their incorporating more 5-out on offense and switching on defense, I thought those were sensible adjustments in light of the Nuggets series. I was okay with the lineup shuffling to start the year when Reaves was struggling and multiple rotation guys were out. But we're almost halfway through the season now and this team doesn't have an identity or any consistency.

 

luke walton 2.0 (yes i was for luke)....talks a good gm but results aren't there, how can you create a last place defense lineup with AD protecting the paint? Alot of his lineup n taking TO accordingly sounds exactly the same as criticism of coach Bud, who like Vogel got fired even tho both won a chip in recent yrs