Well, the owner cares. It's a big leap from being cheap to pay like 70M to a coach you fired. You have to factor that, I think. Coach K is in a different tear compared to Hurley. If I got it straight, Hurley only got relevant last couple years, before he was coaching high school and stuff. Coach K is like Pop of college basketball. He even gets gigs with the USANT. Anyway, I liked the move and was fired up to have a long-term plan for the franchise. Hopefully we get there in the next couple of years
i don't when one of my overarching points is that we operate under restrictions others don't. if ballmer--or, increasingly, any other owner--was in charge, the money isn't an object. i don't cheer for jeanie buss's financial portfolio. i don't view it as that different, tbh. hurley's the hottest coach in college, just like coach k was. if you were fired up, you should be mad we didn't make a serious offer. i was less fired up (i wasn't that fired up about coach k back then, either, because college coaches are a huge gamble), and i'm mad about it because of what it signifies about the operation. if we weren't going to make a ridiculous offer, we shouldn't have made any offer.
It's like we took a time machine to 6 weeks ago. Welcome to the party Woj, room is a little full. From the piece Wonder what his price was to come back to the table. Also seems we're sticking to the FO's roster vision Fairly confident in JJ's ability to get creative with AD on offense after watching Stan get the most out of Dwight. AD has a much better offensive game and more range but I think he'll use spacing and the other 4 on the floor in a similar way.
JJ was the guy all along, every single reporter out there didn’t just get it wrong. I have no idea what that Hurley stuff was, but it clearly wasn’t serious with the offer we gave, maybe in our minds only, but the whole situation was weird, especially with Woj and the Hurley family being as close as they are. The only thing that’s changed now is the Finals is ending sooner than most anticipated, so now we can accelerate things with JJ.
Why do people think we are going to have to pay JJ over the going coaching rate and I’m not talking the upper 10% pay rate. He has ZERO coaching experience. Getting offered a job in Charlotte doesn’t make you a hot candidate. I think almost anyone could get the coaching job in Charlotte and we aren’t even sure that the job was offered to him. If I’m applying for a job with no experience, I don’t expect to be paid top dollar. Even if I went to the Ivy League schools and my Résumé is stellar. My offer also has nothing to do with what the going rates might be in a few years. You don’t make salary negotiations based on future earnings. It’s based on the here and now. If you think revenue goes down is anyone giving a discount off their already signed contract????
Yeah man but I like to have realistic and pragmatic discussions. To put myself in their shoes and understand the best realistic path forward. Yeah, Ballmer spends like crazy but we have been more successful than them, nonetheless. Maybe they're wrong? On the offer, I already shared my view. It's far from "not serious". It was the highest ever to a rookie coach. The highest ever in the franchise. Top 5 in the league. For me that's serious and honestly a slight overpay considering the risk involved and lack of NBA experience. Again, Hurley has as much experience in the NBA as me and you. I'm ok with that slight overpay because of the lack of other options and his Connecticut strong bond. But if the guy wants to coach teenagers with no pressure instead of entering the NBA through the biggest door, he's not wired to endure 6 years with us, even if we doubled the money. Regarding his rep, it's a 2 year rep. And it's college, it's so dependent on the guys you have. He admitted that, they got a guard in late May that he said if they didn't grab him, they would arguably make the last 16. If he sucks the next 2 years nobody will remember him
I was thinking he would've cost us $7m... maybe $8m. I think it's definitely $8m now with another year added on. 6/$48m has just been the number I pulled out of a hat and have more or less stuck with it. That'll put him at Nurse and Kidd's current salary (before Kidd's extension $). What I'm fascinated with is I can't find the price Charlotte or Washington paid this summer at all. We know Bud is making $10m but that's it as far as this summer's cost. Maybe the Cavs salary will leak out, but we don't really know market value (team does, we don't). Point is, based on what coaches are currently getting, I don't think that's a lot. And I do think future earnings will pay a part because of how unstable the coaching market is. It's not like players contracts where they want to take a 2 year deal and then sign another one when the cash influx hits. They want to sign long deals because it increases what they get when they get fired. Either it'll make the team less likely to fire them because the dead money they'll eat OR the coach is at least compensated while sitting on the couch. I think it definitely factors into coaching negotiations this year and next year, maybe they take longer deals just to spread some of that money around.
Doesn’t really matter who was right in all this, but come on, Shams, Buja, and everyone else were correct in their reporting, it’s always been JJ. I’m fine with that, at least he’s an intelligent basketball mind, unlike Ham Also nice of Hurley to put it out there like this, make us not look “cheap” being the deciding factor here. Yeah, at the end he said there’s probably a number that could have landed him, but that was after speaking on how happy he is at UConn and how much it means to him. Maybe we get him if we throw 15+ mil per year at him, but then is his heart fully in it if it’s just a job he took to get a lot of money that took him away from all that he loves where he’s at? I dunno, who can say.
I'm guessing the spin from Rob will be this during his presser: we were impressed with JJ very early on in the process. As a player, announcer, and podcaster -- he has a great basketball mind. Modern offense, Xs&Os, he really has a great grasp of today's game. We identified him as someone who checked a lot of our boxes for what we were looking for in our next head coach. We've maintained ongoing conversations with him during this process. However, we also respect the time and energy he puts into covering these NBA Finals. We agreed to have more in depth conversations as the Finals concluded. During this period, while we continued our process an opportunity presented itself to meet with one of the greatest coaches in college basketball today. We also identified him as a target from the beginning of our search but at that time, he was still considering his future. Everyone understands the opportunity there and the disservice to the organization if you don't pursue every avenue available to you. Ultimately he decided he wanted to stay with Uconn and pursue that third title. I don't blame him, that's a hell of a program they have there. Then finals ended and we were able to finalize an agreement with JJ to be the Lakers next Head Coach. We couldn't be more excited about that. Today we'd like to focus on our new coach and what we think he can bring to this organization both now and for the future. We'll now open this up for questions.
Not sure how the FO could try to message this, but it would make me feel better about the Hurley stuff if the FO just really wasn’t all that into him. They truly believe in JJ and he’s been their target all along, they just knew they’d have to wait until after the Finals. So when Woj and Hurley’s camp started to manufacture Hurley’s interest, the Lakers liked him enough to spin the tires. But they got the sense he wasn’t serious about leaving UConn, and also didn’t like him enough to make the massive offer it would take to get him to actually consider it. It wasn’t that they were cheap, it’s that they just didn’t love Hurley’s NBA prospects enough and figured he might reject it anyways, so why significantly raise the bar for what you’d have to offer the next candidate in line? I don’t necessarily think this is the reality of the situation (if it was, a smart organization would have played the media accordingly so that the fallout wouldn’t have been so embarrassing). And even if it was, I don’t necessarily think that was the right choice (maybe we’d be better off if you DO just make whatever Godfather offer it required to steal Hurley). But I’d at least feel better about this narrative than the FO just being cheap/incompetent
I get the funny optics of this, but I don’t think it actually has anything to do with the coaching search A few weeks ago they similarly skipped a week. I think it’s moreso that as the playoffs have progressed there is less content to talk about. Like their last episode was a Finals preview, so probably wouldn’t have made sense to have another full episode solely about the first 2 games of the Finals (especially now that it’s looking like the series will be over by the time most people would have even been able to watch that episode)
This is exactly how it will probably go. JJ Redick and your podcast, come on down. Hope his kids team at least won a championship because he’s about to be thrown in to the big leagues with no place to hide.
