The Los Angeles Lakers are rapidly nearing the end of their season, as they currently sit in 11th in the West, two games behind the Spurs with four games to play and San Antonio holding the tiebreaker for the 10-seed.
The eulogies have already begun for this Lakers team, with players lamenting what could’ve been had they stayed healthy, while some prominent figures, like Magic Johnson, are already looking ahead to how the Lakers will approach this summer. It’s all fairly jarring to see a LeBron led team bowing out before the postseason, particularly in the new expanded play-in era, but there will be plenty of time for assessing what went wrong and where blame should be assigned for this season’s failure.
One person who is a mortal lock to take some of the fall for this season is Frank Vogel, as the Lakers head coach is expected to be fired as soon as the season officially ends — with it coming as a mild surprise he made it through this season in full. Vogel’s been on the hot seat since the slow start and was nearly fired midseason, and the lack of marked improvement in the back half of the season has sealed his fate. The bigger question is who will replace him, with some major names currently at the helm of playoff teams leading the way.
According to Jake Fischer of Bleacher Report, two big names come up the most among league personnel when discussing the Lakers soon-to-be vacancy: Doc Rivers of the 76ers and Quin Snyder of the Jazz.
As Marc Stein first reported, Utah Jazz head coach Quin Snyder is perhaps most often mentioned by league figures as a possible Vogel replacement. For now, Snyder remains entrenched in Utah and told Andy Larsen of the Salt Lake Tribune: “My focus is on our guys and our team. And as I said, addressing hypotheticals in these types of questions in any form I feel like is disrespectful.”
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Doc Rivers, the Philadelphia 76ers’ head coach, is another active bench leader being mentioned by league personnel as a potential Lakers candidate. Rivers’ tenure in Philadelphia has also come into question of late, spurred by team president Daryl Morey’s deadline acquisition of James Harden and the mounting speculation that followed about a potential reunification with Harden’s former Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni.
Fischer notes that there is some question as to whether Snyder would want the Lakers job over other opportunities that could be available to him, namely replacing Gregg Popovich in San Antonio, where job security is far greater. As for Rivers, he’s noted as a possible replacement for Snyder in Utah given his connection to Danny Ainge who is now in the Jazz front office. Still, it’s clear the Lakers plan on going big game hunting (again) for their next head coach, and the prospect of coaching LeBron and Davis will certainly be alluring, given what we saw as the potential in 2020.
However, the last time the Lakers went through this process they banked on prestige and the chance to win a title as being enough to lure the biggest names in coaching to their sidelines, only to see them balk at lowball offers and go elsewhere — namely Tyronn Lue. Whether they’ve learned their lesson this time remains to be seen, because the situation in L.A. is even worse this go around, as they’re coming off of a performance we’ve never seen from a team that had LeBron healthy for the majority of the season, which proves the floor in L.A. is lower than previously imagined. If they want Snyder or Rivers or someone else to pick them over other jobs (including the ones they currently have), they’ll have to come with not just a great pitch on what they’re going to do with the roster, but also be willing to pay like one of the top jobs in the NBA.
If they don’t, the search gets murky once again, with Kurt Rambis’ name (somehow) appearing once again in rumors, among others.
