Go down, Miss Moses, there’s nothing you can say
It’s just ol’ Luke, and Luke’s waiting on the Judgment Day
—
Robbie Robertson, “The Weight”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
When the Lakers tabbed Luke Walton as their head coach in the summer of 2016, the hire served as a de facto mission statement for the type of organization the Lakers aspired to be. Not one that cycled through coaches every few seasons — he was the fourth new hire in six seasons — but one that would establish stability on the bench.
That was important to Jeanie Buss, whose perspective on coaches had been shaped by Phil Jackson. The Lakers owner saw Walton as the franchise’s new center of gravity in a post-Kobe Bryant world. She liked to
refute claims that the Lakers could not attract star free agents by pointing to Walton, who left his role as a top assistant at Golden State to take over the Lakers rebuild.
What has instead unfolded is nothing short of a betrayal of the values Buss, Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka claimed to champion. Much has changed in the three years since Walton was hired. The culture, style and joy Walton brought with him from the Bay Area were supposed to be the constants — the bedrock of Lakers 2.0. That was, after all, the hope.
With the Lakers now 30-36, Walton is widely expected to take the fall for the season’s failures. Coaches often do in these situations. But to accept that as the cost of doing business would be to overlook the backdrop against Walton was first hired and the (now hollow) words of support he received along the way.
Remember in January when Buss said the Lakers were
“100 percent behind” Walton? At February’s trade deadline, Pelinka said:
“Luke’s done an amazing job. We’re totally unified.”
So why does it seem so likely now, just a month later, that Walton won’t coach the Lakers past this season?
There are really only two explanations for Walton falling out of favor so quickly. Either the coach’s job performance has been far worse than anyone in power anticipated, or the Lakers never really delivered on the support they pledged to Walton along the way, thus setting him up for failure.
“He is somebody that I believe can be our coach for the next 10 or 15 years,”
Buss told the Los Angeles Times in 2017.
Walton’s job performance has not been perfect. But fireable? Through two seasons at the helm, Walton’s teams were on track. The Lakers won 26 games in 2016-17, a nine-win improvement on Kobe’s farewell campaign the year before, then improved their record by nine more wins to finish 35-47. The Lakers defense ranked in the bottom three for five straight seasons before last year, when Walton oversaw a leap to 13th in defensive efficiency.
As of Jan. 15, the Lakers ranked sixth in defense before their injuries caught up to them. It was more than LeBron James missing 18 games with a strained groin. Rajon Rondo missed 14 games with a finger injury that he suffered the same night James got hurt. While both players were sidelined, Lonzo Ball went down with the ankle sprain that would end his season.
None of those random acts of fate would have come back on Walton if Buss had just made his job status non-negotiable, when people like LaVar Ball, Rich Paul and, yes, Magic Johnson tried to intervene. She should have followed the course
set by her old friend Pat Riley in 2010, when James was initially disgruntled with Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra. Riley told his stars in no uncertain terms that Spoelstra would remain the team’s coach. And he has, despite the Heat missing the playoffs in two of the five seasons since James left.
While Buss has been an ardent backer of Walton, she has also empowered Johnson, who has been less resolute in his support. His efforts have all worked against his coach rather than with him. After delivering James in July, Johnson ignored the pleas of the coaching staff that he retain Brook Lopez and Julius Randle. Instead, he signed controversial and limited journeymen JaVale McGee, Michael Beasley and Lance Stephenson.
When
a fiery early season meeting between Johnson and Waltonbecame public, Johnson responded not by saying he supported Walton but that he would allow him to
“finish the season.” After the season? All bets would presumably be off.
Walton has coached the last 60 games under that cloud. Now the season is all but over. The Lakers have shut down Ball, lost
Brandon Ingram to a scary blood clot in his arm and started restricting James’ minutes. The case for firing Walton will only grow with each loss, and there will be many more, despite the fact the Lakers’ unbelievable bad luck this season has had little to do with Walton or his actual shortcomings as a coach.
Walton has a year left on the four-year contract he signed in 2016, and firing the 38-year-old would cause considerable heartburn for officials within the organization who, according to team sources, continue to advocate for him.
So how did Walton end up in this position? Is it as simple as the Lakers will miss the playoffs despite getting LeBron?
That may actually just be convenient cover. Walton was hired to be an organizational centerpiece, not a stopgap like his predecessors. Byron Scott was hired to keep Kobe Bryant in line for his final two seasons. Mike D’Antoni was brought in to maximize the potential of a roster featuring Steve Nash.
Walton was hired to be groomed and grow along with the young roster that Mitch Kupchak and Jim Buss had built.
Kupchak and Buss were, of course, fired less than a year into Walton’s tenure, but that was not necessarily seen as a move that worked against the first-year coach. His biggest supporter outranked even the most senior basketball executives. And the replacements for Buss and Kupchak — Johnson and Pelinka — were directed to see through Jeanie Buss’ vision.
“What was important to me was how he felt about our coach, Luke Walton,”
Buss told the L.A. Times about hiring Magic.
Johnson said the right things about Walton from his first day on the job, but his ensuing actions made you wonder if that was just Magic playing nice to satisfy Buss. Johnson has never advocated for Walton in the way one would expect from someone whose job depended on his success.
Since Johnson’s arrival, Walton has consistently been undermined by his front office, dating back to January of last year when LaVar Ball
blasted the second-year coach for not having command of the Lakers’ locker room amid a nine-game losing streak. Rather than come out in support of their coach, Johnson and Pelinka remained quiet, allowing Walton to twist in the wind. Replacement candidates were reported. Lakers officials later said they had asked Walton if he wanted them to make a public show of confidence. He declined.
The reason to show support for a coach in that situation, however, is not because he asks you but because demonstrating you believe in him would lead everyone else to follow suit.
Ultimately,
a tweet from Buss calmed the waters, but the next obstacle for Walton was just lurking around the bend in the form of James. As soon as LeBron committed to the Lakers, analysts wondered if Walton would command the respect of the three-time champion and four-time Most Valuable Player.
Again, this is where the organization should have helped Walton out. It would be difficult for him — or any coach with a limited track record — to command that respect on his own. It requires an infrastructure that is fully aligned behind the coach.
And make no mistake, this is not to say James is to blame for Walton’s likely firing. LeBron has never publicly endorsed his coach, but he has also never challenged Walton or attempted to embarrass him. However, what James did do, by simply agreeing to play for the Lakers, was elevate Johnson’s expectations to such an unreasonable level that he could not properly process the Lakers’ 2-5 start in October.
Was anyone other than Johnson really surprised that the Lakers struggled early on? Johnson and Pelinka ignored years of precedent to build a team that was totally antithetical to what had worked for James in years past. They ignored what got him to eight straight NBA Finals, instead surrounding him with ball handlers and assuming he would play differently in Year 16 than in the previous 15.
They added a 33-year-old James to a team of second- and third-year players, and then bridged the obvious gap with a combustible combination of veterans on one-year contracts.
That was not stability. And a slow start was far from shocking.
Rather than considering those factors, Johnson took his frustrations out on Walton. And he likely will again at the end of the season, overlooking his own office’s responsibility.
Not only did the Lakers fail to keep quiet their efforts to trade the bulk of their roster for Anthony Davis, but Johnson also
bungled the inevitable fallout when the deal failed to materialize. Of the two trades Johnson and Pelinka did make at the deadline, one — trading starting center Ivica Zubac for the short-term rental of Mike Muscala — made the team demonstrably worse.
The Lakers’ current predicament with Walton can be traced back many steps. If Buss was convinced that she needed to hire Johnson, a team legend who had never held a position in an NBA front office, to run the Lakers, then she should have at last given him a seasoned general manager — not Kobe Bryant’s former agent who spent two decades making enemies of rival agents and NBA executives.
And, indeed, Walton should not be immune from criticism. His tactical acumen is often questioned by others in the profession, and his in-game adjustments could certainly be better. And there’s room to wonder if he has been able to instill a sense of discipline within his loose culture. But those are things the Lakers could have worked out over time with a coach they believed in.
If the Lakers ultimately decide they must fire Walton at the end of the season, it will be because of their own mistakes, not his. The Lakers, from Buss on down, have not made good on the promises they made when they hired Walton three years ago. And those promises were not just to a young coach, but to their fans as well.
Johnson and Pelinka were already going to have to repopulate the roster that they stocked with unreliable players on one-year deals, but now they likely will be looking for a new coach — their fifth in nine seasons.
If anyone wonders why the Lakers can’t give their fans the kind of team they feel they deserve, it is due in no small part to their inability to be the kind of organization they once hoped to be.
This was when I was really concerned. We really came in to camp with Javale and Zubac (who was terrible most of last year) as our only centers...
