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

Is he fired yet?

 

nope, jeannie still owns the team

 

this is hilarious

 

https://x.com/trevor_lane/status/1752785144006443471?s=46&t=VpASWooOp-c0BfbMzXjnIw

 

Fire this f***ing dumb b**** a** coach man. He keeps getting saved by us when we have these big wins over the best teams in the league.

He continues to play TP f***ing 35+ minutes a night and nobody is calling him on it except Jovan Buha.

So sick of this f***ing coach man...

 

Maybe he thinks Prince got added as an All Star Reserve?
That’s all I got, and I’m only half kidding based on how out of touch this dude is.

 

I'm in!

 

Let’s type up an official petition!

 

I am having a cognitive dissonance day... reconciliating my happiness winning against C Bags and my sadness of that fact buying this dimwit some time.

But I am still happy, since in a game where we led from the start, Pimple Jr. is the only one ON THE ENTIRE TEAM (who is not a Withmore disappointment) with a negative +/-.

 

Eh. Good job last night overall.

We won a game we should’ve clearly lost and he’s at least got a little juice left with the team as that was the hardest I’ve seen them play in forever.

 

This is sarcasm, right?

If not, then no, not a good job with Prince usage, Rui & Christie usage, etc. And Reaves and DLo led the team in playing hard, and they clearly don't like Ham and snub him publicly. But this is the type of thinking that Rob and Jeanie probably have, and any success the players have in spite of Ham will mean we're stuck with him longer even though he's an obstacle they need to overcome, and publicly say so.

 

No, not sarcasm. I still don't like Prince playing more than Rui, but that's a good win in a game everyone expected us to lose.

Team had every reason to mail it in and they didn't and yes, I'm happy to see that.

As far as Ham, well, it is what it is right now. Frank should have gotten the patience Ham is getting but that ship has sailed. Ham's made a ton of mistakes but best case scenario is for him to figure things out and get back to whatever it was he was tapping into last season when we got to the WCF.

Even if he doesn't figure it out, I don't think we'd fire him in the middle of the season. Media backlash would be brutal and I can't say I'd defend the front office given their track record over the last decade.

 

Media backlash would be tempered by what Milwaukee just did, and I don't care about that anyway, I just want the team to improve. Rob and Jeanie care about that though.

And they don't understand the situation. The backlash over Vogel was that he was a good coach and didn't deserve to get fired over Rob, Jeanie, and LeBron's mistake with Westbrook. The situation is not the same now. The coach is not good, and players and Lakers media are calling him out and at first subtly and now non-subtly calling for him to be changed. It's the right move.

Waiting until the end of the season is too long, because he hasn't shown any ability to learn from his mistakes, despite players and media telling him what to do - he's still doubling down on the wrong lineups and minutes distributions. Need to fire him now. Interim coach Handy or even Jent can't be worse and would probably be better, even if they're not long-term HC material.

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against firing Ham and I wouldn't mind handing the keys to Handy or Jent and seeing what they can do.

But the media never looks at things in our favor. I get them being nervous about how that will be perceived by the media and any coach we wanted to replace him with.

We're in a tricky spot as we would have fired a guy who won us a ring and a guy who just got us to the WCF back to back. At the very least it will likely drive up contract demands for whoever the replacement would be.

 

I agree with all that, but I don't care about any of that. It would improve the team. I don't care if it costs the team more money to a future coach. Look at Milwaukee paying 3 coaches. That's the right business move. It's chump change compared to the worth of the Lakers. But Jeanie acts cheap for cash flow reasons when she should be thinking net increase in value reasons. You can turn value into cash, but cheaping out in order to save a little cash even if it lowers your value is just stupid.

 

Baffled why Ham doesn't go with the Dlo/Reaves/Vando/LBJ/AD lineup that brought success last season. WTF is up with Ham's infatuation with Prince and Reddish? The common denominator here is they previously played for Ham (when he was an assistant) in Atlanta. Players generally spend significantly more time with assistants than head coaches, so basically Prince and Reddish are "his guys". The same can be said for Shroeder, but at least there would be some warrant to playing him. But imo, I think he was a bit overutilized by Ham, due to the same issue. In my opinion, this is flat-out favoritism.

 

Ham was baffled by the first quarter and 3rd quarter struggles. It seems the team has an anchor that pulls the team down both on offense and defense.

 

Reddish is injured, Vanderbilt is now injured too. If people think that Rui or Max would somehow be a better fit than Prince with the starters, they haven't been really paying attention to those two at SF. Prince has become the scapegoat around here, but perhaps Cam and Jarred, were both already playing too many minutes?

It's just weird that we couldn't guard a chair, against Houston and Atlanta, but we went out, and put the clamps on the C Bags in Boston, without Lebron or AD.

Has our team leadership just been lacking?Frankly, I've been a bit puzzed, by the performance of our two best players, in crunch time in a lot of games this season.

We shouldn't be losing this many games, with a healthy Lebron and AD period, but they are getting the ball down the stretch, and they aren't always delivering the goods.
There is a whole lot of, " WTF are you doing Lebron? Or AD"? In crunch time this season IMO. We are the only team in the NBA, with two players considered to be top 10 in the League, but we are having issues closing out games?

And the culprits are role players or the HC? Nah..I'm looking at my two best players first.

 

i really don't think of our failings as late game issues. it's getting our doors blown off to open 80% of halves, all season long.

and yes, vando ahead of prince would solve a lot of that. and yes, vando's been hurt a lot, but ham was already thinking of demoting him before his first injury, and he didn't promote him after he was healthy.

there's lots of blame to go around when a team with this much talent is .500, but ham's probably the biggest and most solvable problem.