The Los Angeles Lakers have done the expected and fired head coach Darvin Ham after two seasons, the team announced.
A search for a new coach is expected to begin immediately. As relayed by our Ashish Mathur, several names have already been mentioned as potential replacements.
Several reports on Ham’s future emerged last week after the Lakers were eliminated from the first round of the NBA playoffs by the Denver Nuggets. LA has lost 12 of 13 to the defending champions.
One of those reports came from The Athletic, which accurately predicted Ham’s fate with the franchise.
The report cited “some stakeholders” saying that Ham’s future in Los Angeles is “in serious peril.”
Ham just completed his second season, with the Lakers finishing as the No. 7 seed in the Western Conference each time. Both years, they lost to the Nuggets — last year in the conference finals in four games, this year in the first round in five.
“It had been one step forward, two steps back for the Lakers over the two-plus months since their In-Season Tournament championship,” the Athletic report read. “But this, as some players saw it, was a sign of the locker room coming together in an attempt to salvage a challenging situation with the head coach with whom they often didn’t connect. Their self-empowerment, it seemed, was born out of the perceived absence of effective direction from the coaching staff.”
Ham, 50, is a former NBA forward who compiled a 90-74 record in two seasons coaching LeBron James, Anthony Davis and the rest of the Lakers. He had been an NBA assistant from 2011-22, first with these very Lakers, then the Atlanta Hawks and Milwaukee Bucks under Mike Budenholzer.
Interestingly, Budenholzer could become a candidate should the Lakers part ways with Ham, per Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN.
“If you are a head coach of the Lakers and you get swept in the first round of the playoffs, or you lose in five, you’ve got job issues. You’ve got job security issues,” Wojnarowski said on NBA Countdown. “And Darvin Ham will have that.”
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