Asleep at the Wheel

So last week was an exercise in the early bird getting the worm, or biting the hand that feeds, I don’t know, I don’t do “analogies” (no idea why I air quoted that, I definitely meant analogies). To give you some context, I am about to move to New York for two months to shoot a show for Netflix (I can’t say much more than that), and so life has been busy with packing, getting our place ready for sub-leasers, blah, blah, humblebrag, humblebrag. Needless to say there was some ball dropping during that time, and yes, that is supposed to be a really bad pun in regards to basketball.

I was seriously about to write a post about how the Lakers need to seriously fire Byron Scott.  Then, they fired Byron Scott.  Then, I was going to write a post about Byron’s firing and give some suggestions as to what the new coach should do.  Then, they hire Luke Walton after I wrote more than enough for a full post. I was going to talk about how it’s not personal, and how Byron is, and will be a Laker for life.  I was going to talk about how I used to work Byron Scott basketball camps over the summers while I was at Cal Poly, and how every experience I had with man, painted him as a great leader. However, over all of that, I was going to say that he still deserved to be fired. I guess for fun’s sake, here is that post:

Nothing personal.  As I said, I used to work Byron’s camps.  I am a die-hard Lakers fan, and as I have already all stated (maybe I should just delete the first paragraph here, but comedy is repetition, so this will all probably come up again), and Byron will always hold a special place in all of our hearts for the Showtime days. Those days of Showtime are long, long gone, and Byron seemed to be the only person who still felt like kids who were born years after Showtime ended, would want to hear stories about it.

THE PEOPLE v. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY – Pictured: (l-r) Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O.J. Simpson. CR: FX

When I was twenty working Byron’s camp, hearing stories about running with Magic, and Worthy, and Rambis was all I wanted. Sitting with the man who recruited him to Arizona State tell us stories how OJ took Byron on his recruiting trip to USC (yeah, that OJ as in Orenthal J. Simpson the person, but not this picture, this picture is of Cuba Gooding Jr).   Now to a kid in his early 20’s…in 1996, this kind of story was  really cool. But telling those same stories to a twenty-year old in 2016 is like someone telling me stories about Gail Goodrich in the 90’s. I respect them, but do I really wanna hear them? Probably not.

Maybe, if you cast John Travolta as Gail Goodrich, I would wanna hear the hell out of that because Travolta’s Robert Shapiro is the best/worst performance by an actor in twenty years. Unless Ryan Murphy changes his plans for Season 2 of American Crime Story, twenty-year old Kenny would probably not want to hear about how things were back in the 60s, so why would we expect D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle to just fall over themselves because they are being coached by a Lakers legend. They need to respect him, but not pine over him.

Which leads me to my next point, which is Byron’s offense was totally outdated. Before I continue, I am not an analytics guy, meaning specifically that I don’t know how to compute a lot of them, but I respect the data that they represent. Byron, very famously, does not respect analytics, and it showed on the court. Everything that the Lakers did this season was slow. A ton of one-on-one (there is a for sure an analytic that will show you the lack of ball movement in the Lakers offense), working deep into the shot-clock, leading to a usually contested shot. If the year was 2010, then what I just described would called “the NBA”, but those times are long gone.

Offenses now are predicated on movement and spacing, you know, the stuff that the last Lakers coach who everyone hated preached and coached. We all thought he was crazy when he wanted to bring Pau Gasol off the bench, or have Pau sit out at the three point line to shoot threes.

For the record, that was really stupid, and he really messed up with Pau, but he had the right idea, in that, unless you have a back to the back post player like Al Jefferson or Hassan Whiteside, you really shouldn’t be playing someone deep in the post for over 30 minutes a game, much as Byron did for the ENTIRE YEAR! Look, we all love Roy Hibbert on “Parks and Recreation” (and I am not just saying that because I was in four episodes of the show, but any chance I can get a shameless plug for a really great show, that also gives me residuals if you go and stream it, I’m gonna go for it),

…but the fact that Byron never at any point played Larry Nance at center, and Julius Randle at power forward, show a real lack of creativity. I mean, once the season was lost, he should have really unleashed the kids on the NBA. Nance starting at center would have probably generated the same stats that THE Roy Hibbert was giving (please crunch the numbers analytics person, and Nance’s athleticism would have added more than Hibbert’s length.  See below.