NBA rumours The Lakers have fired Frank Vogel

NBA rumours: The Lakers have fired Frank Vogel

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The Los Angeles Lakers’ season didn’t go as hoped, and Frank Vogel is beginning to feel the real consequences. So after rumors all year that it would be him Fired as expected, the team has finally pulled the trigger for the move and will move away from the head coach with whom they won a title less than two calendar years ago.

Adrian Wojnarowski nailed the story as the final buzzer of the team’s 33-49 season sounded.

I, um, have a feeling he might find out before now, Woj! Especially considering the report came out before he conducted his post-game interview.

But even outside of the team’s disappointing season, it was written on the wall that the organization had not been fully committed to Vogel for some time. After being whispered that they would either not give Vogel an extension or not extend him for more than a year in the final year of his contract, the team announced its extension in a news release on Friday night, the first indication it was something they did were trying to sweep under the rug rather than celebrate a decision.

Not long after, the (anticipated) subsequent report that the extension was in fact only for one year made Vogel a lame duck coach (indeed). That they’d previously hired an assistant coach whom LeBron James loves in David Fizdale — whose previous small-ball offensive philosophies suited this roster better than Vogel’s love of big-ball — did little to quell the speculation. By mid-season there were multiple leaks that Vogel was about to be canned at various points and that he would have already been sacked had Jason Kidd still been on his bench. The team couldn’t even wait until the season was over to let on that their decision had already been made, so it’s no surprise that the news broke so soon after it was officially over.

In short, this wasn’t exactly an unexpected end to the perennially awkward arranged marriage between the Lakers and Vogel, who really never seemed to be the team’s first choice from start to finish.

That’s not to say Vogel did himself many favors during a truly miserable 2021-22 campaign. Completely overhauling the team’s offensive system so that there was no continuity for an already absent roster might have been a mistake in hindsight, but greater was Vogel’s early, dogmatic and often uncanny commitment to a big lineup with DeAndre Jordan as the starting center in hoping to regain the regular-season form the team found with the Anthony Davis/JaVale McGee frontcourt from the 2019-20 season, although Davis had expressed a willingness to play mostly center this season.

Instead, Vogel started Jordan for 16 of the Lakers’ first 23 games before playing him a total of just 12 times the rest of the year before Jordan was cut midseason. The Lakers only finally committed to smallball when Vogel was ill with COVID-19, but he eventually started big again at perhaps the worst possible time: In the team’s last meaningful game of the year, with Dwight Howard and Avery Bradley alongside Russell Westbrook and the returning Starting duo LeBron James and Anthony Davis in an abominable starting group that only a coach who cares so little about the level of shooting required for success in the 2022 NBA could love.

As a result, the team lost to the Pelicans, sealing their fate. The game — complete with lethargy, lack of offensive creativity and a fourth-quarter meltdown — was basically a microcosm of the 2021-22 Lakers.

Well, maybe some of the decisions Vogel was constantly blasted by his biggest critics for were front-office enactments, but it certainly didn’t have to be the revived remains of Jordan stumbling around out there if the desire was to get big early, and The team didn’t have to prioritize shooting in their lineup as much as they did, as often as they did. They didn’t have to be as allergic to change or funnel riders towards rim protection, which small lineups didn’t have. They didn’t have to play Avery Bradley that often.

This team — and, as it turned out, Vogel in particular — simply never had enough margin for error to offset all of their mounting self-efforts, errors that sapped the team’s spirit and belief in themselves to the point where they basically given up around the all-star break who has no longer committed to playing consistently hard and focused basketball for a coach they clearly viewed as little more than a substitute coach for his eventual replacement, a replacement who most of them will not see them because of their own actions.

To be fair to Vogel, injuries to the team’s wings early in training camp made it more difficult for the team to fully and effectively embrace the small-ball identity they were designed for, and Rob Pelinka and Kurt Rambis built this team on just having Talen Horton-Tucker and 36-year-old Trevor Ariza as wing options beyond LeBron also deserves scrutiny here.

Still, Vogel didn’t necessarily get off to a good start, although there’s a deeper context to why he went in the direction he did, a direction that led to him having a metaphorical lunch at Chik-Fil right now -A got .

There will be (and has been all year) outcry in the national media and maybe even some local media that this is unfair. This bird got a bad deal. That he didn’t build that team and certainly didn’t carry the charge of acting for Russell Westbrook. And maybe the front office giving him a list of the worst possible ways to play his chosen style doomed him. On a human level, it certainly wasn’t very considerate.

But if anything, it’s easier to argue that the team should have let him go sooner. It wasn’t the job of the star-heavy Lakers team to build around their head coach. Vogel’s preferences would never be at the top of the totem pole. That’s just not how the NBA works. LeBron James, Anthony Davis and Rob Pelinka all wanted Westbrook and a team full of certified buckets. Fair or not, it was Vogel’s job to optimize this grouping. He didn’t, and now he’s gone.

Make no mistake: Vogel is a fine coach, and his frenetic defensive style will always be something Lakers fans have to thank for the team’s dominant run to the 2020 title. But as the team leaned more toward a small-ball, offense-focused approach to spare their stars attrition with age, Vogel’s inability to schematically or alternately find a way to coach the team he had, rather than the team he wanted was ultimately a big part of his downfall, even if roster decisions out of his hands played a role in those mistakes.

And at some point it became clear that the front office wanted to do just that. It’s better to rip the band-aid off than pull out the mess when they’ve already made their decision. Even though they might have waited until Monday — or at least until after Vogel’s post-game presser — every coaching decision this regime has made, from lowballing Ty Lue to forcing Jason Kidd on Vogel’s staff to Vogel’s staff only signing a three-year deal before reluctantly adding a year to it showed just how responsible coaching is for them. So while Vogel wasn’t the only issue, getting him fired and a new voice is clearly the next step as the team tries to move forward from a year everyone wants to forget.

With Vogel gone, it’s not exactly known where the team will go from here and who will take the job, but Quin Snyder, Doc Rivers and other familiar faces are expected candidates. And as the hours, days and weeks go by, more will certainly emerge as to the reasons behind that decision, but it always felt inevitable that Vogel would be made the scapegoat if this season didn’t work out. Front offices, no matter how flawed, are not fired or reassigned. It remains to be seen if this coaching change can actually fix anything, or if much of the same institutional rot that has led to this always awkward season will also derail the Lakers’ next coach.

This developing story will be updated with more information.

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