Lakers fire Mike Brown in dumb, panic move

By: Kels Dayton

There’s no denying it: the Lakers panicked by firing head coach Mike Brown just five games into the season. Sure, the team is off to a 1-4 start, its worst since 1993-94, but five games is nowhere near a reasonable amount of time in which to decide the future of your franchise. It wasn’t Brown’s fault that the team was struggling; with so many new pieces and big personalities in L.A., it was impossible to believe that the Lakers would get off to a flying start. “After 5 games, we weren’t winning and we weren’t seeing any improvement,” said G.M. Mike Kupchack.

Really? No improvement after five games? That’s like saying that toilet training isn’t going well after your two-year old’s fifth bowel movement. ESPN calculated that firing an NBA coach this early in the season would be like firing a college football coach in the third quarter of his first game. 

It’s not like Brown was given a proven winner with a championship pedigree. This group was thrown together over the summer like a fantasy team. And Brown hasn’t coached a single minute with a healthy, fully-stocked roster.

Steve Nash has missed 3 games. Dwight Howard just had back surgery. Kobe Bryant has been playing through a foot injury and will miss tonight’s game with Golden State.

The Lakers’ arrogance in thinking that they can fire a coach five games into the season and replace him with someone better is off the charts. There were rumors of Jerry Sloan, Mike D’Antoni, and of course, Phil Jackson returning to the sidelines. More likely, it will be an assistant coach, like interim head man Bernie Bickerstaff, who takes the role for the rest of the year.

“Clearly, great coaches or good coaches in this league that have jobs would not be let out of their contracts with their team,”  Kupchak said. “So that’s not really a realistic possibility. I think there is a remote possibility that you look at assistants in the league and of course teams at that point would not stand in the way of a coach advancing his career. I think it’s more likely that we would look to coaches that aren’t presently employed.”

Whatever. It doesn’t matter who the Lakers bring in if they aren’t willing to give him a chance. Magic Johnson tweeted that he didn’t think Brown was the right man from the beginning. But if that was the case, the Lakers never would have hired him.

There are rumors that Kobe was behind this, that his death stare (below) was all the foreshadowing Lakers brass needed to make this move. But even Kobe knows that five games mean jack squat over the course of an eight-month marathon of a season.

 

 

If the Lakers do end up turning their season around, it won’t be because they changed coaches. Brown got a raw deal in Cleveland when he was fired after a 60-win season, and he’s getting  a raw deal now.

Metta World Peace bid his coach farewell in a way only he could.

“You gotta feel positive for Mike Brown,” he said. “He came from doing video work. You can look at it as a positive for everybody. Just move on with life. It’s not cruel. It’s just business. It’s still fun. We’re just playing basketball. He’s not the first coach to get fired in sports.”

Pau Gasol said that he was shocked by the move.

“I don’t think we lost faith [in Brown] at any moment,” he said. “I believed in what we were trying to do. We also understood it was going to take a little bit of time to do things the way we wanted to. It sends a pretty direct message to all of us. There’s no messing around. It’s time to step it up.”

With Brown’s firing comes the return of a subplot we all thought we had finally escaped.

Will Dwight Howard leave if things fall apart?

Howard admitted last week that he his dream destination had been Brooklyn. But he has also said that he loves L.A., and Howard does own a home in the area and spends much of his off-season time in Los Angeles.

It’s way too early to speculate about Howard’s future, but then again, it was way too early to fire Brown, too.

 

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