by Paul Teetor
The sing-song chant started long before the end of the embarrassing Lakers home loss in game three, their 11th straight loss to the Denver Nuggets: Fire Darvin…Fire Darvin…Fire Darvin…
A week later, the Lakers gave those fans their wish, firing Head Coach Darvin Ham on Friday morning.
But if Lakers fans think firing Head Coach Darvin Ham will fix this team, they need to think again. And if they think this is the Lakers low point – a 4-1 first round loss in the playoffs – they really need to think again.
It’s going to get worse – much, much worse – for the Lakers and their many Beach Cities fans in the coming seasons. And it has nothing to do with firing Coach Ham. That was just another mistake in a long line of mistakes that have led the Lakers to this perilous point.
That’s because the team’s management – owner Jeanne Buss, General Manager Rob Pelinka, and special consultants Kurt and Linda Rambis – have badly mis-managed the team and its assets. They have painted the Lakers into a corner with no way out.
Eventually, with or without LeBron James, it’s all going to collapse and the Lakers will have to face reality: they need a complete rebuild.
They have tethered their team to a soon-to-be 40-year-old superstar making $55 million a year. They also have a 31-year-old co-star in Anthony Davis who is making $40 million and is injury prone and inconsistent. They are backed up by a bunch of no-name misfits, castoffs, minimum wage guys and a supposed “third star” in D’Angelo Russell who can’t – or won’t — play defense and can’t hit a shot when it really matters.
Normally, when an NBA team hits bottom like this, there’s really only one solution: play badly and lose most of your games for a few years, get a bunch of high draft picks as a reward for your ineptitude, and then hope those draft picks blossom into stars.
You can see that approach working to perfection with the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Orlando Magic and the Minnesota Timberwolves in the playoffs right now. All three teams are loaded with young, skilled talent, and the sky’s the limit for all three.
But that approach requires patience and astute moves by management before the drafts and especially after the drafts – and the Lakers have been sorely lacking in both areas.
Imagine a Lakers team led by LeBron James, backed up by All-NBA player Julius Randle and All-Star player Brandon Ingram. They in turn are supported by second-tier role players like Josh Hart, Kyle Kuzma, Jordan Clarkson and Alex Caruso.
Now there’s a team that could compete for an NBA championship every year. There’s a team that wouldn’t drain LeBron of all his energy in playoff games so he had nothing left for the fourth quarter. There’s a team with a future.
All six of those players were drafted by the Lakers. All six spent their early, developmental years with the Lakers, learning to play the pro game and making typical rookie mistakes that they gradually eliminated from their games.
But today Ingram plays for the New Orleans Pelicans, Randle and Hart play for the New York Knicks, Kuzma plays for the Washington Wizards, Clarkson plays for the Utah Jazz, and Caruso plays for the Chicago Bulls.
All are starters for their teams. Some are stars.
As Laker rookies, every single one of those players showed promise and collectively they appeared on track to develop into an effective core of a championship contending team.
Then along came LeBron James in 2018, and the whole organic build-through-the-draft plan was scrapped in favor of a win-now approach and worry about the future later.
When the Lakers failed to even make the playoffs in LeBron’s first season with them, he put tremendous pressure on management to ditch the kids and bring in a legit second star so he wouldn’t have to carry the load all by himself as he aged into his late 30s.
So the Lakers packaged Ingram, several other players and most of their future draft picks in a trade for Anthony Davis. That team won one devalued NBA title during the pandemic season in a Florida gym that was closed to everyone but the players and staff – who couldn’t wait to get out of there — and they haven’t come close to the NBA Finals since then.
But that wasn’t the only terrible decision that has led the Lakers to this point. There were two other disastrous moves that changed the trajectory of the NBA’s flagship franchise.
The Lakers had the second pick in the 2017 draft, and knew that they had to pick a great player. This was their chance at a potential superstar and they knew they might not get another chance for a long time.
Most talent evaluators had Duke’s Jayson Tatum pegged as the best player in the draft. In one year of college ball he had proved himself a great shooter at 6-foot-8 and a good passer and defender. But Philadelphia, which had the first pick overall, saw it differently and instead chose point guard Markelle Fultz out of Washington.
That left Tatum there for the Lakers as a no-brainer draft pick. But Magic Johnson, who was running the draft room for the Lakers at Buss’s invitation, had other ideas. He saw the reincarnation of himself in UCLA’s Lonzo Ball, a great passer at 6-foot-6 who had a really unorthodox, unreliable shot.
Magic, recalling his past when he was drafted out of Michigan State as a great passer with an unorthodox, unreliable shot – which he fixed in the pros – insisted that the Lakers should take Ball. He even predicted that one day Ball would be on the wall of Laker greats alongside himself.
So the Lakers took Ball, tried to fix his shot, and eventually realized they had made a terrible mistake. They traded him in the package for Davis, and he now has proved so injury prone that he has missed most of the last two years and may never play again.
And Tatum? He went on to be an All-Star and eventually an All-NBA selection, meaning he is now one of the top 10 players in the NBA.
That’s the kind of draft mistake that can cripple a franchise for five to 10 years.
The Lakers have been scrambling to recover from that horrendous mistake for the last six years. They’ve been doing desperate things like trading for Russell Westbrook as a “third star” to appease LeBron and then dumping him – throwing in a precious first-round draft pick to convince Utah to take him off their hands — because LeBron refused to play with him any longer.
The Lakers should never have fired Darvin Ham. He was not the problem – management is the problem because they gave away all their power to LeBron.
LeBron is still a great, great player as he enters the twilight of his career. But as a shadow general manager, he’s a total bust.
Darvin Ham deserved better.
Lakers fans do too.
Happy Trails to the Great Candace Parker
Candace Parker, the MVP of the Los Angeles Sparks 2016 WNBA championship, announced last week she is retiring after 16 years as a pro.
It is a great loss for the game at the exact moment women’s basketball has broken through with the general public. And it’s a shame new fans tuning into just how exciting the women’s game is won’t have the pleasure of seeing one of the all-time greats, a top five player in the history of women’s basketball.
Parker won two national championships at Tennessee, then pulled off the rare double play of winning the WNBA Rookie of the Year and MVP in 2008.
After spending her first 13 years with the Sparks, Parker finished out her career with the Chicago Sky and the Las Vegas Aces, winning a championship with each of them.
Since 2018 she has been a color analyst for both college and pro basketball, and she recently signed a long-term contract with TNT to continue in an expanded role.
So while we won’t get to see her perform on the court any longer, her keen insights and colorful commentary will keep us entertained for many years to come.
She was one of the pioneers who paved the way for Caitlin Clark and JuJu Watkins.
Thanks for the memories.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
