Lue not being officially extended yet is interesting though. Gotta be careful we don’t get strung along.
I think since he has so much skin in the game with everyone that cares about the NBA knowing and being skeptical and mocking of the back story simplistically reduced to the Lakers hired JJ laughably because he’s “buds with Bron on a podcast” …. that the opposite happens …. he’s locked into doing everything he can to support him.
Regarding the other assistants, I like Nori over Adelman by a lot as far as fit. Nori is their defensive guru and I think succeeding with their bigs would be easier to translate to an AD team. We're clearly lacking the necessary wings but that's where Rob would have to get to work. Vando is a piece. Maybe Cam in a smaller more defined end of bench role. Adelman is the offensive guru with Denver but he has prime Joker, so that could easily be fool's gold. We don't have a Joker. I also think he gets a more favorable reaction from ESPN because he's their golden boy. It would look really bad on their part to s*** on the hire if he's headlining their NBA Finals coverage and has done countless appearances on all their morning shows. Maybe NBA twitter piles on, but that's with anything.
From the Shams clip i posted elsewhere....Interviews starting up next week or the week after. Atkinson and JJ are the first two names he lists. Had interest in Bud before he went to Phoenix. Also mentions Adelman and Borrego as guys who will likely get looks.
While talking with an ex-NBA player in the Mind the Game forward podcast «Lakers» expressed dissatisfaction with the refs approach during the series with « Nuggets » ( 1-4 ). James: Playoffs usually make playing harder. But if we take our series, it seemed to me that these were the matches of the damn regular championship. Reddik: Says a guy whose team has the biggest penalty difference in NBA in the last two seasons. This damn guy. James: To hell with this (laughs).
Riley wasn't as big a gamble as some think. Jerry and Pat played on a championship team together, Pat was in the broadcast booth and new all about Laker culture and expectations, he at least had some assistant coaching experience if I remember right and West shadowed him in the early stages of his head coaching until it was obvious he was a genius.
I'm not okay with that. LeBron is terrible for team chemistry. Letting LeBron handpick the coach may be one of the worst Laker decisions ever made. He isn't going to listen to any coach but like you say, this would look terrible to the other players. Bringing in a coach that is only there to protect LeBron's legacy. The other players know they have practically zero chance of winning with LeBron and it shows in their play. The Lakers and LeBron are the laughing stock of the league right now. Other teams want us to keep LeBron bc they know we are easy out with him in stat padding mode. I am very surprised how many here have enjoyed watching this very bad brand of basketball and are clamoring for more...lol.
I guess I’d like to try to keep the coach after Lebron leaves and so I see this hire differently than you and @wallangong. JJ is growing on me a bit because he is obviously intelligent and well spoken but there’s a lot more to coaching than that. I’m actually not crazy about any of the names we see getting bantered about. Some guys I rate a little higher than others but none of them are the knock out of the park kinda hire I’d like to see but of course none of those guys are available.
and I don't see any of "those " kind of guys becoming available to us until after Lebron retires AND we are towards the end of a successful rebuild. Then right as we are getting ready to make some noise, someone will want to tie their boat to our dock. Just like every other team. Crappy teams get new coaches, simply because the coaches need experience and need to pad their resume. The great coaches get to pick and choose their destination. Beginners take what they can get and some of them get lucky.
LeBron wants to win in June and he and the team will try to do that as long as he's here. Both might bungle it and make a Russ trade in the process, but in their flawed way that is the north star. I don't always agree with his methods or the team's in this pursuit. BUT give me that over post-Bron days all day every day. Did we forget the s*** show of an organization we've been since Phil left and since Dr Buss died? We became a laughing stock then. Not now. Kobe's final years were disgraceful to him. The rudderless and directionless cluster f*** organization ran by nepo babies who are way in over their skis. Bron saved us from the gutter and we only won because he chose to come here. Want to have a nightmare...imagine that didn't happen. Without him, I have zero faith in this organization to suddenly become competent. We have too much history and a record that proves they're not. So I'm hoping he doesn't retire until the wheels fall completely off and hopefully Jeanie's tenure will end shortly thereafter.
I don't at all understand this quote. I think James wants him because he has spend hours and hours talking high level basketball with someone he sees as knowing and thinking the game on the same level as he does and in his opinion, whether proven right or wrong, is going to make a great coach. Which will help win games. Nothing would cement his legacy better than to have another puncher's chance and actually deliver another ring to the Lakers at the end of his career, plus having been instrumental in finding that next, since forever, long term good coach. His legacy (in Los Angeles) gets blown to crap if it all goes south on him. That's the way I see it anyway.
And I don't understand this quote either. What is this very bad brand of basketball? Do you think he actually wants at his age to have to be a point guard and control and set up the offense all season long every game, versus out of desperation when the series with Denver is in crunch time and DLO is in a cold / in his head spell and AR wasn't being in HIM mode ... LeBron feeling HE had to see if he could take over and change how it was going? We weren't losing all those games we shouldn't have because LeBron was ignoring Ham and playing LeBron dominating the ball basketball. Quite often, unfortunately not enough in "closing out games" the basketball was all kinds of fun to watch, as he deferred to DLO and AR to set things up and help with the scoring load.
i've begun to look forward to the end of the lebron era, but i also remember: yeah, i don't see any house-cleaning until lebron's done, so let's just do what he wants here and try our best to compete. the one thing that's been good so far is we haven't mortgaged the entire future, much to lebron's chagrin. if him picking the coach keeps us from having to trade a bunch of unprotected picks in the post-lebron era to get next year's version of bojan bodganovic, i'm down. coaches are relatively cheap.
Honestly guys - I would get Frank Vogel back as head coach. This roster is way more better suited for him than the Suns roster, and to be honest, the Suns got dealt a bad hand and had injuries literally the entire season and they just happened to run into a red hot Wolves that are potentially gonna sweep the defending champions. I know it's unpopular, and maybe Frank wouldn'gt even entertain coming back given how we let him go...but seriously if we got Frank back, I'd be very very happy
