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Columnist: Kobe should've been consulted on Brown hire


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Not positive this deserves its own thread, but it didn't really seem to fit in the playoff thread:

Columnist: Kobe should've been consulted on Brown hire

I disagree wholeheartedly. Players play, management manages. The idea that the inmates run the asylum has gotten so far out of control in sports, that the media is even on board with it. It's ridiculous.

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I think it's fine. Kobe is far more important to the success of the Lakers than Mike Brown is, and he's still in his prime. The NBA is such a player-orientated game that I think it makes sense to be responsive to the best guy on your team, especially when that guy is a five-time champion.

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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I think it's fine. Kobe is far more important to the success of the Lakers than Mike Brown is, and he's still in his prime. The NBA is such a player-orientated game that I think it makes sense to be responsive to the best guy on your team, especially when that guy is a five-time champion.

Gotta agree with this. Although it is a bit ridiculous how inflated pro athletes' egos can be, it makes sense for the Lakers' ownership to ensure that they're getting the most out of their high-salary players.

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Good luck finding anything in the media about the process the Lakers went through to hire Mike Brown.

I don't think its a bad idea to at least have a chat with your best player about how he feels about potential hires, but at the same time who's the say that something like that didn't already take place or that the Lakers didn't already know what Kobe's opinion was. Maybe they just figure that Kobe is going to be 33 years old next year and are counting on Mike Brown lasting longer then Kobe will in LA. You don't know what's going on, and I doubt this guy does either, so I wouldn't regard most of this article as anything more then speculation on what might have happened. But people need something to write about and if they can't come up with a story then they'll make up one.

I wouldn't get too upset over it.

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Players play, management manages. The idea that the inmates run the asylum has gotten so far out of control in sports, that the media is even on board with it. It's ridiculous.

This is true for baseball, football, and hockey, where players are such small cogs in a large and multi-tiered machine that they have no business meddling in the affairs above them. But in professional basketball, your best player accounts for more time, production, and so forth than in any other team sport, and so I can see why a veteran superstar may like to have some input. While the list of players who have the basketball capital to guide a coaching hire is super-short, it certainly consists (perhaps solely) of Kobe Bryant.

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I think it's fine. Kobe is far more important to the success of the Lakers than Mike Brown is, and he's still in his prime. The NBA is such a player-orientated game that I think it makes sense to be responsive to the best guy on your team, especially when that guy is a five-time champion.

Gotta agree with this. Although it is a bit ridiculous how inflated pro athletes' egos can be, it makes sense for the Lakers' ownership to ensure that they're getting the most out of their high-salary players.

It sure does.

But the coach a superstar wants isn't necessarily the one who will get the most out of him.

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This is true, but don't you think that Kobe, having spent almost all of his career under Phil Jackson, knows the difference between having a fun boss and having a good one? If we're to believe that Kobe still has an interest in winning a title, which I'm pretty sure that he does (remember the story of how he immediately hit the gym when he heard about LeBron?), then I wouldn't expect him to steer the Lakers toward a coach that would let him goof off and eat candy. In fact, if his Cleveland tenure is any indication, that's exactly what Mike Brown is going to do.

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I think it's fine. Kobe is far more important to the success of the Lakers than Mike Brown is, and he's still in his prime. The NBA is such a player-orientated game that I think it makes sense to be responsive to the best guy on your team, especially when that guy is a five-time champion.

Gotta agree with this. Although it is a bit ridiculous how inflated pro athletes' egos can be, it makes sense for the Lakers' ownership to ensure that they're getting the most out of their high-salary players.

It sure does.

But the coach a superstar wants isn't necessarily the one who will get the most out of him.

Or do the best job of coaching the rest of team.

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Players play, management manages. The idea that the inmates run the asylum has gotten so far out of control in sports, that the media is even on board with it. It's ridiculous.

This is true for baseball, football, and hockey, where players are such small cogs in a large and multi-tiered machine that they have no business meddling in the affairs above them. But in professional basketball, your best player accounts for more time, production, and so forth than in any other team sport, and so I can see why a veteran superstar may like to have some input. While the list of players who have the basketball capital to guide a coaching hire is super-short, it certainly consists (perhaps solely) of Kobe Bryant.

Exactly, in any system that could be potentially run on the Lakers, the ball is going to go into Kobe's hands at least once a possession for about 75-80% of the game. And if Kobe isn't happy or on the same page, it's really hard for this team to run anything. Kobe going into "Eff You" mode gets Kobe his points sure, but it screws over the team as a whole. So if you don't have a coach that works with Kobe, that he will actually listen to and is happy with, the Lakers get on the bad end of it.

I mean sure Kobe told off and ignored Phil some of the time, but Phil still had his ear and his respect to bring Kobe back into the fold, and ultimately, Kobe knew that Phil was right most of the time. I doubt Mike Brown will have the same pull with Kobe, at least initially.

And I totally agree with your last point, if there is any player in the NBA that has the basketball IQ to know what coach will not only work for him and the team at large, it's Kobe Bryant. Really, Kobe could probably coach the triangle offense himself, but I don't know if Kobe could coach the triangle offense with himself in it.

Additionally, I hope that Brian Shaw will be retained as an assistant. Now I really don't know if Shaw would accept that or if he wants to go after any other NBA top jobs, but I would hope he would stay to keep the triangle intact on the offensive end and let Brown big the top guy and orchestrate the defense. I know Shaw eventually wants to be a head coach, but if there isn't a readily available position for him elsewhere, I'd like to see him stay as the Lakers assistant in the meantime.

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Should the Lakers have talked to Kobe about hiring Brown? Probably. I think we've gotten to the point where we've forgotten the roles of players and that is to play. Sure, you might ask them who they think they could play with, or who's a clutch performer that you might think about acquiring, but when it comes to the role of hiring a coach, I'm sorry, but that's the GM's call and the players need to learn to play for the coach, not the coach catering to the players. If you're a good player, you can play for any competent coach and looking at Brown's record and the fact that he was the coach of the team that got to a final, he's a good coach. Mitch Kupchak's job was to find a coach who could get this team to the finals and probably one with less of an ego than the egomaniac himself, Phil Jackson. Players need to play and stop worrying about be consulted about every move. That's just my opinion. And in all reality, who out there is as qualified as Brown to coach the Lakers? Probably, no one.

 

 

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And apparently from what I've hear around here on radio and elsewhere, this Mike Brown hire and the process was Jim Buss waving his dick around at the rest of the organization. He's trying to make his stamp on the organization and the basketball side of the team. Bynum has been his pet project and Jim Buss is one of the reasons Bynum is still around. He also wanted to not hire Shaw because he had a feeling that would allow Phil Jackson to still have a "voice" in the room. He didn't want Jeanie Buss to be looked at as part of the actual basketball operations and that she had more of a say in the actual team because of Phil or any of his influence, etc, etc.

There is also the kind of correlation to the "inmates running the asylum" thing proposed in the thread too. If Shaw was the coach, you still have the Phil connection, you have Kobe being the big voice in everything. It would almost be like the players chose the coach. And Jim Buss and the front office would almost be a meaningless name on the stationary.

Basically, with the whole operations of everything being transitioned to the Buss children, Jim Buss is trying to establish his control.

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This is true, but don't you think that Kobe, having spent almost all of his career under Phil Jackson, knows the difference between having a fun boss and having a good one?

No.

Nor do I think he neccesarily knows the difference between a good boss and one he can control. Few of us do.

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the players need to learn to play for the coach, not the coach catering to the players.

Kobe has played fifteen seasons with five championships; I don't think he needs to learn how to play for a coach.

The self-evident move here was to promote Phil's assistant and maintain the status quo while you still have most of the principals from the last two championship seasons. The Lakers are in a weird point in time where they're not yet so old as to blow up the roster and dream it all up again, but they're probably not a favorite to win the conference, either. All they can really do is keep doing what they're doing, change parts here and there, and try to keep the old jalopy running for another year or two, see if they can get lucky. It's just not the time for a new system, whether that's running nothing but isolation sets or letting Kobe do whatever the hell he wants, or maybe that's the same thing I don't know

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Because they have Kobe for two more years and aren't going to waste them on a rebuilding effort. By anyone else's standards, they shouldn't tread water and hope to get lucky, but the Lakers don't really operate like anyone else. I can't see them being willing to step back for a while, partly because even if they tried, the rest of the league's general managers will bend over backwards to give them players.

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Because they have Kobe for two more years and aren't going to waste them on a rebuilding effort. By anyone else's standards, they shouldn't tread water and hope to get lucky, but the Lakers don't really operate like anyone else. I can't see them being willing to step back for a while, partly because even if they tried, the rest of the league's general managers will bend over backwards to give them players.

Yep. The Lakers basically won a conference championship directly because of this with the Pau Gasol trade in '08. The Grizzlies got Marc Gasol, the guy who would end up being "the other guy" in the Gilbert Arenas Gun Scandal, and a sack of potatoes. Absolute joke of a trade, but that :censored: just seems to happen a lot for the Lakers.

But back to the topic at hand...I mean, I understand both sides of the argument. Kobe's got tenure, and most of that tenure has been spent winning championships. It was said earlier in the thread that basketball's different, and even then, it's a pretty short list when it comes to "Players you consult when it comes to hiring coaches." and Kobe's on that list. I think if there's any player in the league that could be consulted on a matter like this, it's probably Kobe at this point of his career. Seriously, if you can't trust a player with the experience (winning experience, at that) of a Kobe Bryant, who in the league can you trust?

Then again, if you have Kobe handpick a guy, then that coach has basically had his authority cut, because once things get rocky, Kobe will probably get the idea that "Hey, I brought you here. I can make sure your ass is gone whenever I want, too." That + Jim Buss getting the big balls all of a sudden means that you can't have a player thinking that he runs the place, even if that player is Kobe "FIIIIIIIIIIIVE GOLDEN RIIIIIIIINGGGSSSS" Bryant. And honestly, that's the side that I'm leaning towards.

So yeah, I see both sides, but it's hardly a joke that Kobe didn't get consulted on the hire. Hell, knowing Mike Brown & that crap he calls an offensive scheme, Kobe's probably gonna enjoy the hell out of the next few years.

 

 

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I can't see them being willing to step back for a while, partly because even if they tried, the rest of the league's general managers will bend over backwards to give them players.

Come on now. Not every GM in the NBA is as dumb as Memphis-era Jerry West or pre-playoff-run Chris Wallace.

That trade still makes my stomach turn, however. The already-too-entitled frontrunners in the Laker media and fanbase have now been emboldened because of it to proclaim that the Lakers are getting Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, AND Blake Griffin, and somehow would be able to afford that on top of Kobe's god-awful contract. They're living in a dream world but that doesn't make it any less annoying.

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