by Paul Teetor
The Lakers coaching search is now officially embarrassing.
And confusing.
And chaotic.
The hoops world looked on in wonder as the Lakers were humiliated Monday afternoon by University of Connecticut Coach Dan Hurley. After three days of mulling over their $70 million, six-year offer to become the new face of the purple and gold, Hurley very publicly rejected the Lakers.
Their “mis-management” team of owner Jeanie Buss, General Manager Rob Pelinka and “special consultants” Linda and Kurt Rambis has compiled an epic record of failure: seven going on eight coaches in the 13 years since they said happy trails to Phil Jackson. It’s a revolving door that would never have happened under Jeanie dad, the late, great Jerry Buss.
Now they have exceeded their own record for ineptitude, letting the search for the next scapegoat for their personnel failures stretch on and on while the leading candidates were publicly humiliated.
It’s now been well over a month and counting with no coach and no resolution yet.
It’s been a shitshow and it very well could get worse.
First there were so many leaks out of their El Segundo headquarters that they convinced the hoops world that they had settled on NBA broadcaster and former Clipper J.J. Redick, who lived in Manhattan Beach for five years while he was a Clipper.
Redick by all accounts has an unmatched analytical basketball mind.
Just ask him.
The LA Times even ran a story last Wednesday, based on “informed sources not authorized to comment publicly” that the Lakers were about to give the job to Redick – who has zero coaching experience, unless you count coaching his kid’s team in youth basketball.
But the news that Redick was about to be hired prompted major pushback from some Lakers players not named LeBron. LeBron was fine with Redick getting the job because they have a podcast together and seem to be on the same page when it comes to basketball strategy and tactics.
But an image that attached itself to Redick when he was at Duke – that he is an arrogant, know-it-all type who always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room – suddenly was cited by unnamed players as a reason why they thought he was a bad candidate for on-the-job training, no matter how many veteran NBA assistants he was given to help guide him.
It was a hangover from his college days when he was widely considered the most hated player in the land, a worthy successor to Christian Laettner, the Duke center who preceded him and established the tradition of Duke villains that everybody loved to hate.
ESPN even made a documentary about Laettner called “I Hate Christian Laettner.” Redick didn’t generate quite the same level of hostility, but he came close.
But that was long ago, and Redick’s long career as a dead-eye shooting guard in the NBA and subsequent three years as an NBA analyst seemed to have put that image to bed.
Just when it became conventional wisdom that Redick would be hired as soon as the NBA Finals are over – he is doing color analysis of the series between the Dallas Mavericks and Boston Celtics – Thursday morning the hoops world woke up to a genuine bombshell report.
Adrian Wojnarowski, the top guy when it comes to dishing the inside scoop on NBA stories and rumors, reported that the Lakers were close to hiring Dan Hurley, who won the last two NCAA national championships at UConn.
Then things started to get crazy.
Woj – who has the best sources in the business and is rarely proved wrong — reported that the Lakers were preparing a “massive, multi-year offer” to convince Hurley to take the deal quickly. Later other sources said the offer was $70 million over six years.
The idea was to have Hurley establish a long-term winning culture similar to what he had done at UConn, but the “mis-management” team forgot one thing: Hurley wins by acting like an over-caffeinated maniac on the sidelines during games — and he’s even worse in practice.
He has admitted that “sometimes I’m an asshole” and he led the nation in technical fouls called on him and his team the last several years.
That confrontational, foot-stomping, high-volume style has worked wonders for him in the college game where everyone knows he’s the boss. But it’s a really bad fit in the pros. Grown men with big guaranteed contracts, men who play the game for a living, don’t respond well to screamers and rah-rah cheer leaders. They have to have a coach they respect and will listen to on a collaborative basis.
Besides, Hurley’s family was reportedly reluctant to leave the comfortable confines of Storrs, Connecticut and move across the country with the 51-year-old Hurley.
Then Woj reported that Hurley was flying into LA for a meeting/interview Friday afternoon. At that meeting the Lakers pressed him to agree on terms that had already been hammered out in preliminary discussions with his agent.
The conventional wisdom: the Lakers will do whatever it takes, and he will get on the plane to fly back to the east coast as the new Lakers coach.
The reality: while Hurley was in LA, Connecticut was preparing a counter offer. Then came Monday afternoon’s bombshell that Hurley was staying at Connecticut.
As the smoke cleared, it became obvious Hurley may well have been using the Lakers interest to prod UConn into making him a Godfather extension – an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Now the Lakers will have to deal with their public humiliation, with an equal dose for Redick – or whoever they ultimately convince to take what was once the top NBA job but one whose job description now is simple: Keep LeBron happy.
The mis-management team – Buss, Pelinka, Rambis and Rambis – has screwed up yet again.
It’s hard to imagine that it could get worse than this.
But until Jeanie Buss is convinced to sell the team, Lakers fans have nothing to look forward to but more chaos, more confusion and, yes, more public humiliation.
Happy Trails to T.J. Simers
All Ball was not a fan of the LA Times sports columnist T.J. Simers, who died this week of a brain tumor at age 73.
But whether you liked him and his writing or not – and most people didn’t – he was a sports columnist at a time when they still mattered, at a once-great paper that has a tradition of must-read columnists, from the great Jim Murray way back in the day to Bill Plaschke, who’s still cranking out insightful columns today.
The problem with Simers was his shtick. He had to fill three columns a week – which is a lot to ask of any writer – and he did it by trolling, insulting and generally demeaning any sports figure he could find in the clubhouse, the locker room or at a news conference.
Athletes are notoriously thin skinned, and Simers had a knack for finding someone’s vulnerable point and pounding away at it until they snapped and unloaded their rage, resentment and insecurities on him.
Bingo! He had his column for the day.
And if he could develop it into a feud that lasted weeks or months, so much the better. He particularly liked to antagonize Dodgers like the obscure infielder F.P Santangelo (who?) and the slightly better-known Jeff Kent.
His method was lazy and despicable, in All Ball’s humble opinion, and there was much push back from the sporting community.
But the guy who gave him the column – long-time LA Times sports editor Bill Dwyre – enabled him and protected him for many years.
Finally his act wore thin and he parted ways with the paper in 2013. After a short stint with the Orange County Register, he sued the Times for age discrimination and a host of other alleged sins.
He was awarded millions in court, but never saw a dime of it because the Times appealed the verdict. The case is still stuck in the courts today.
The tragedy with Simers was that he was a talented writer who, once he graduated from reporter to columnist, used his talents to provoke, antagonize and bring people down rather than using them the way Murray did and Plaschke still does: to lift them up and find the beauty in life and sports.
Still, he made his mark on SoCal and his passing should not go unremarked.
Rest in Peace, TJ.
Your fight with the sports world is finally over.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
