The Los Angeles Lakers are “highly unlikely” to retain Darvin Ham as coach after the team suffered its second straight playoff exit at the hands of the Denver Nuggets, per Shams Charania, Jovan Buha and Sam Amick of The Athletic.
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 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.”
Hoops Wire will have more on this story as the news becomes available.
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