Darvin Ham Set to Depart as Lakers Head Coach: A Chronicle of a Foretold Departure

This goes beyond the classic when the river sounds, water carries: it is not official, but it seems like a fait accompli that Darvin Ham will not be the coach of the Lakers next season. In fact, the main voices close to the Los Angeles team have agreed that the position will be vacant when this week ends and that the search for the new tenant will begin next week. This has been stated by both Jovan Buha (covers the Lakers for The Athletic) and Dave McMenamin (ESPN).

“The last thing I heard is that the plan is to not count on Darvin and to communicate it at some point, probably at the end of the week. Then the search for a new coach will begin. Some names are already being heard, but it will not be clearer until the situation with Ham is resolved. But in the last couple of days I have continued to hear that he will not be the coach,” Buha said on The Athletic NBA Show podcast. McMenamin, for his part, launched the same idea on The Dan Patrick Show: “Yes, it can be anticipated that there will be a change of coach…”.

In reality, the future of Ham, who has covered the second season of a contract of four and about five million dollars per year, was compromised since the Lakers were eliminated by the Nuggets on Monday. On the one hand, the defeat in the first round is already a reason for the franchise to reevaluate the sporting situation, no matter how much it fell against the champion and due to a very tight -11 total in point difference (4-1 final). . On the other hand, as soon as the season ended for the Angelenos, The Athletic published an article in which it was clear that the players had lost confidence in Ham. Among other things, it was revealed that they felt worse prepared than the Nuggets for game endings that have decided the series between them in the last two seasons (8-1 overall, -35 in points in nine games). And that they continued to respect Ham (champion as a player with the 2004 Pistons) as a basketball man but no longer as a strategist.

Disagreements with Russell, Davis…

The union between coach and locker room, important in the turnaround of last season that followed the departure of Russell Westbrook and that allowed that season to end with good feelings (in the Western final), had been broken. ESPN pointed out the changes in Ham’s rotation, how players took a dim view of D’Angelo Russell and Austin Reaves spending weeks starting from the bench. The Lakers started badly, reacted, won the In-Season Tournament, had a horrible month afterwards and had to row against the current again to finish, again in the play in. The injuries to the secondary players (key to Jarred Vanderbilt) have been important, but it is obvious that the team has performed much better, at the pace of the best in the League, when Ham returned to what worked in the last playoffs: Russell- Reaves-LeBron-Hachimura-Davis.

In the same McMenamin article, Ham was quoted in quotes sending a message to those headlines: “It’s incredible that people keep talking about the consistency of having a stable quintet but don’t pay attention to the greeting or how the players are performing. If you are coaching a team and one of your starters spends ten games in a row pooping in bed, what do you have to do?” Russell and Ham had problems last season, with the former upset by the greater weight in the team management that Dennis Schröder had. Russell, in fact, was thinking of changing scene until the German signed with the Raptors. After the second game of the series against the Nuggets, when the champion came back from 20 points in the second half and won with a basket at the buzzer by Jamal Murray, Anthony Davis said that there were “stretches of the game where it seemed like they didn’t know what What were they doing”.

So Ham’s departure is anything but a surprise. Not everyone believes that he is one of the main people responsible for the fact that things have not gone better, but almost no one believes that in him the Lakers have the optimal coach for the future. In his last press conference, Ham began by saying that “in any case it had been two incredible years leading the Lakers,” something that could not without much problem be considered a farewell, at least just in case.

The wheel starts moving again

Now, names will start to come out. First, and a few days ago, Adrian Wojnarowski (ESPN) said that the Lakers did not want to pay a fortune to fill the position with an elite coach, which could complicate negotiations with someone like Mike Budenholzer, champion with the Bucks in 2021 and perhaps, right now, the most renowned technician on the market. But McMenamin blazed a trail that others have followed by putting two names on the table: Tyronn Lue and JJ Redick.

Lue has one more year guaranteed with the Clippers, but he could leave the other LA team if things end in elimination against the Mavs in the first round (2-3 pending game six, match point for the Texans in their home court). He is one of the coaches with the best reputation in the NBA, and he already negotiated with the Lakers before they signed Frank Vogel, with whom they were champions in 2020. There were financial disagreements, but also a kind of power struggle in which The Angelenos believed that Lue was a character too close to LeBron James, who would thus have even more command in the franchise. The coach himself confirmed it years later: “The Lakers thought I wanted to go train LeBron, and what I wanted was to go win. I think they weren’t fair, and I wasn’t going to take his offer just for the sake of it. I felt better than that.” Lue led the 2016 champion Cavaliers, who won the ring after overcoming a 3-1 defeat to the Warriors with LeBron as the superhuman MVP of the Finals.

JJ Redick left the courts in 2021 (he is 39 years old) and since then he has become one of the great media personalities of the NBA. First with his podcast The Old Man And The Three, which continued the projects he had already had as an active player with Yahoo and The Ringer since 2016. His analyzes earned him a place at ESPN, where he grew by leaps and bounds in the organization chart. of commentators. And his latest successful move has been Mind The Game, a podcast that he started in March and in which he thoroughly deconstructs the tactical ins and outs of basketball with… LeBron James as a partner.

Be that as it may, the Lakers are about to begin their third coaching search in six years, and the fourth in nine (Luke Walton, Frank Vogel, Darvin Ham…). And they do it with Rob Pelinka forced to decide which path the franchise is going to take. Make small adjustments to try to reinforce the current block with more depth, defense and shooting (terrible in its low points, brilliant in its high points) or go on the hunt for a third star, something that went horribly wrong with Westbrook and that already has in many headlines to Trae Young.

And all pending the future of players who will surely not accept their player options and will go on the market: LeBron, around whom the entire strategy revolves and who in principle will continue (but it is not 100% certain that it will be like that… not even with what type of contract would make it), and D’Angelo Russell, notable in the regular season, too irregular in the series against the Nuggets but a player who would be very difficult to replace due to the financial/contractual situation of the Lakers who, without him , they would also lose one of their main transfer assets (which is why a sign and trade would be a much more desirable option for the franchise). The first step, in any case, will be (it seems to be a given) the departure of Ham. A Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

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2024-05-03 08:15:35
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