Charles Barkley Says Suns And Lakers Issues Aren’t Coaching, But Whoever ‘Put Them Trash Ass Teams Together’

The Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Lakers both had their seasons come to an end this week, as the Timberwolves polished off a sweep of the Suns and the Nuggets beat the Lakers for the eighth time in their last nine playoff games.

As always happens when teams with stated championship aspirations coming into the season lose early in the playoffs, there has been plenty of chatter about what went wrong and what comes next in L.A. and Phoenix. For both teams, a coaching change could be on the horizon, as Frank Vogel seems a likely scapegoat with the Suns and Darvin Ham has come under fire from many Lakers fans.

Coaches are often the first person to get fired because it’s much easier to change coaches than it is to overhaul a roster, or be willing to look inward as a front office at the mistakes you made. That is something that bugs Charles Barkley, especially when people in the media call for folks to get fired, and he used last night’s Inside the NBA broadcast to once again get some things off his chest about the “punks, idiots, and jackasses on other networks.”

This is at least the third time Barkley has gone after folks on ESPN for their coverage of the Lakers (and Warriors), but this time he also wants to know why GMs James Jones and Rob Pelinka aren’t facing the majority of the criticism for putting “trash ass teams” together. In Chuck’s eyes, the Suns and Lakers stink because of the players, not coaches, and if anyone in the organization deserves blame it’s the ones who build the rosters.

He is probably not wrong. It’s hard to see how just a coaching change makes either of these teams a real contender, and they both need to revisit how they’ve constructed these rosters around their stars — or, in Phoenix’s case, the stars they’ve chosen to bring in. The problem is, that’s a much harder thing to resolve, as neither team has great assets — L.A. does have more than Phoenix — and money is tight given their stars at the top. So, the coach will land a lot of the blame. That said, it’s more than fair for Chuck to call that out as scapegoating, as is his critique that many avoid pointing the blame on coaches because they want players to like them.