What on earth is happening out in Tinseltown? The Lakers are in trouble out in the West and there are no signs of that getting better anytime soon.
Their season has been, to say the least, a mess. The premature firing and hiring of Mike Brown and then Mike D’Antoni goes to show that the front office may not be thinking about the moves it is making.
In my opinion, neither move should have happened. They need to stop worrying about signing a ‘big’ name coach and look for the right man for the job.
While injuries, chemistry issues, a horrible bench and an identity crisis sure have played a part in the Lakers underachieving this season, I have no doubt a large part of this problem is due to their coach, Mike D’Antoni.
When you can’t win with the personnel that the Lakers have on board, you know you’re not the right coach for the job. So how can the Lakers find their Mr. Right this season?
The Lakers defence is horrible right now, and none of their new additions are helping solve that.
Dwight Howard, three-time defensive player of the year has been solid coming back from injury, and that will only improve once he gets back to 100%.
However, he has been the only defensive pillar, and the team’s defence as a whole suffers from Mike D’Antoni’s defensive system, if you could honour him by referring to it as that.
D’Antoni is a strictly offensive coach, with limited defensive capabilities, which is unfortunately the Laker’s biggest basketball issue. Their spacing is all wrong, they’re slow to rotate, and the genius of San Antonio and Gregg Popovich exposed the hell out of them.
It was nothing short of a minor miracle (Earl Clark) that the Lakers managed to stay in the game. It is clear as talented as this team is, D’Antoni is not the man needed to implement the defensive systems the Lakers need.
It is clear on paper that the Lakers have one of the best offensive starting line-ups in the league. Between them, they have almost 70 years of experience on the NBA court. Almost any one of them could be the offensive alpha dog on another team.
The offence basically coaches itself, hence a Lakers coach should be more of a mentor, guiding the superstars in how to correctly use everyone’s offensive prowess together most effectively, and less of a system-based offensive man.
Mike D’Antoni is exactly the latter. And what’s more, Mike’s ‘offensive genius’ is a run-and-gun, ‘7 seconds or less’ offence that is the exact kind of up-tempo rubbish the septuagenarian Lakers shouldn’t be running.
They’re much better when they slow the ball down and run their half-court sets than try and outgun their athletically superior peers.
This is why D’Antoni is unecessary. While a fourth coaching change in one season wouldn’t look good, the Lakers need to pull the trigger now if they want to win one more with Nash and Kobe around.
I touched on it a bit last paragraph, but a Lakers coach also needs to be able to handle several superstars and their different personalities. Do I dare mention Phil Jackson?
There are a number of different coaches doing that in the league right now, such as Mike Woodson, Doc Rivers and Erik Spoelstra.
All of these men would make great coaches, but it would be hard to pry them from their respective cities.
Perhaps an ideal move would be to travel the road less taken and hire an assistant who has worked under one of the aforementioned coaches during their time managing several stars.
If they choose not to elect a rookie head coach, likely due to the magnitude of the task, then there are plenty of former head coaches they could take a look at such as Jerry Sloan, Mike Dunleavy, Jeff Van Gundy etc that could work a miracle in La La Land.
It should be clear to all (especially the Lakers) that D’Antoni is not the right guy for the job; he never was.
And as much as the Lakers don’t want to make a fourth head coaching personnel change this season, they must if they want to win and win big immediately.
With players like Steve Nash, that is what this team is built to do. Mitch Kupchack is a pretty damn good GM, but he needs to wake up.
The Lakers won’t save him this time.
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