Before we delve into who the Los Angeles Lakers might hire as their next coach, we can all agree that the way they let Frank Vogel go was classless. Leaking this news before Vogel had even been personally informed of his fate was such a small step. Adrian Wojnarowski had released this report about five seconds after the final buzzer of the Lakers season. Obviously he had this message before and was sitting on it. The formality of Vogel’s dismissal is irrelevant; This was a total dump from a front office that continues to use Vogel as a scapegoat for its own shortcomings.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s move on to who Rob Pelinka – who for some reason gets to continue pulling the levers for the Lakers when none of the other 29 teams in the league would hire him in the same capacity – – could tap to replace Vogel. Our Sam Quinn has compiled a list of 25 potential candidates.
One of those candidates is Mark Jackson, who hasn’t trained since being fired by the Golden State Warriors in 2014. It took a long time for the stench around Jackson’s name to dissipate as details about his controversial tenure with the Warriors emerged. Honestly, it’s probably still not resolved. Still, according to The Athletic’s Sam Amick, LeBron James would be “very excited about the prospect of Jackson coming to the country [Lakers] Work.”
LeBron has supported Jackson in the past, and let’s not forget that Jackson is a Klutch Sports customer. Of course, LeBron will speak well of a man represented by the agency he’s affiliated with. It’s also not like LeBron has been the best coach or player in the past. This is the guy who lobbied for Erik Spoelstra to be canned in Miami and pushed the Lakers into trading for Russell Westbrook last summer.
The Lakers haven’t always given LeBron his way. As Amick pointed out:
If James truly had the casting vote, Ty Lue would have been hired as head coach in Summer 2019 in place of Vogel. Ditto for Jason Kidd, who was Vogel’s senior assistant with the Lakers for the last two seasons before leaving for Dallas last summer.
Kidd is an interesting comp for Jackson as the stench around him as head coach was pretty bad both on and off the court before the Mavericks hired him to replace Rick Carlisle. To his credit, Kidd took many of the defensive principles he learned from Vogel and the Lakers with him to Dallas, which helped the Mavericks start the postseason as the West’s No. 4. Kidd has been a good coach this season. Many would not have bet on that.
Maybe Jackson finally deserves a second chance. Just remember how bad things ended up for Golden State. Not to mention the player-vs-one games he was famous for, or the fact that Jackson ruled over a dressing room so full of paranoia that an assistant coach found it necessary to record private conversations, for fear of what was said about him, or even that Warriors owner Joe Lacob said Jackson couldn’t get along with anyone in the organization (check it out this thread for a laundry list of Jackson transgressions) the man just wasn’t a good basketball coach.
Yes, he instilled a committed defensive mentality that had long been absent from this organization, but a lot of that was personal (hello Draymond Green, Andrew Bogut, a surprisingly defensively adept Klay Thompson – even early in his career – and gritty role players like Carl Landry and Jarrett Jack).
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The offensive was the problem. It was isolation/old-school matchup dependent, and the passing was almost non-existent, making it far too easy for defenses to focus on Steph Curry playing a million pick-and-rolls while everyone else stood around . Curry was great enough to cover some of that, but ultimately Jackson’s Warriors fell drastically in comparison to their level of talent as the No. 12 offensive player three games short of missing the playoffs last season.
Working with essentially the same roster as Jackson, Steve Kerr took over in 2014-15 and immediately led the Warriors to 67 wins and a championship. Think about it. From 51 wins and a first-round elimination in Jackson’s final season to 67 wins and a championship less than 12 months later under Kerr. Again with essentially the same players.
But hey, we always allow and expect growth from young players, but we tend to think of coaches as finished products based on their latest performance. Kidd got better. Maybe Jackson could do the same with a second chance. I doubt the Lakers will provide that opportunity, but if they did, it doesn’t sound like LeBron would object.