This Goes Out to You, and You, and You

The Lakers are struggling and since I am The Laker Hater, I love seeing that happen.  There are quite a few things about this year's team that already, I find myself just anxious to complain about.  I was going to try to contain being a hater for a short while this season, but with Friday’s announcement that Mike Brown has been fired as the team’s coach, I’m starting it now.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Mike Brown.  At the same time, he’s not the worst coach in the world (that one goes to Lawrence Frank right now).  He has a finals appearance, a coach of the year award and a win-loss percentage above .600 going for his career.  The bottom line is that after only 71 games as the Lakers head coach, he did not deserve to be fired.

Coaches often come under fire when they’re leading these super-teams of today’s NBA.  The same thing happened with Erik Spoelstra last year, but Pat Riley chose to keep him around and the results were great for them.  Personally though, I still rank Spoelstra among the league’s worst head coaches right down there with Frank, but that’s a separate story.  I knew Mike Brown would be on the hot seat quick, but firing him after just 5 games this season is low.

The Lakers current struggles aren’t due to Mike Brown’s coaching though.  The Lakers are struggling because Dwight Howard isn't rebounding as well as he normally does.  The Lakers are struggling because Steve Nash is injured.  The Lakers are struggling because Kobe is turning the ball over more than he ever has.  This is a big reason why I hate Kobe Bryant and the rest of this organization so much.  It can’t be the players’ fault that the team is losing.  The players are too good; they do no wrong.  It’s all the coach’s fault, right?

Let me ask this to you Kobe fans out there: if he’s better than LeBron, how come he couldn’t get Mike Brown a trip to the finals?  LeBron did, and he never had players even half as good as Pau, Nash, Bynum or Howard out there.  He had Ilgauskas, Larry Hughes and some guy who calls himself Booby.  Yet he carried that team to the Finals, past a Pistons team that finished with the best regular season record in franchise history.  Sure the Cavs got swept in the finals, but that was expected against the Spurs, who were making their 4th finals appearance in under a decade.

Speaking of hating on Kobe, he needs to shut up and quit it with these so-called “injuries.”  This has happened a good 5 or 6 times per season over the past few years and has happened twice already this season.  The Lakers, along with Bryant himself, put out statements about how Kobe is going to play in the next game, despite an injury suffered just days before.  Every time, Kobe gets out there looking like he’s at 100% strength.  A sore ankle does not qualify as an injury.  High levels of physical activity often result in soreness, and it’s no reason to sit out practice as he did this week.

What’s happening is that Kobe’s trying way too hard to build some sort of reputation for being some type of “iron man,” athlete out there.  It’s not tough to play through a little post-game soreness.  In fact, it’s quite pathetic to try to make a big deal out of every little ounce of pain as if it’s something that’s going to effect your playing.  You're not injured, you're being a crybaby.

Kobe has been talking about how he wants Phil Jackson to return to coaching in Los Angeles and I really hope we don’t end up seeing that situation.  Phil Jackson has already come out of retirement twice, and his indecisiveness in staying retired just irritates me.  I’ve never really liked Phil Jackson and I was happy to see his career end the way it did. 

In his last outing as a head coach, we saw the Lakers getting swept in a game that the Mavericks won by nearly 40 points.  The Lakers took the defeat in a truly despicable  fashion, with Lamar Odom getting ejected for body-checking Dirk Nowitzki's and Andrew Bynum getting the boot for a vicious elbow to the mid-section of JJ Barea, a guy who is a full 1 foot and 110 pounds smaller than him (Bynum's likes to use this dirty move, see here).  Game 2 saw Ron Artest clotheslining Barea as well.  I loved watching them fall apart and prove to everybody how disgraceful they were in losing.

Another thing I don’t like about Phil Jackson is his recognition as one of the greatest coaches ever.  I get it; he does have 11 championships to his name.  At the same time, he has never played a single season without some combination of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Shaq, Kobe or Pau Gasol on his team.  The fact that he had seasons where guys like Gary Payton, Karl Malone, Glen Rice and Horace Grant were third and fourth options out on the court shows the immense amount of talent he had to work with.  He also had great court leaders like Rick Fox and Derek Fisher, as well as solid role players like Toni Kukoc, Steve Kerr and Robert Horry.

I’m not saying Phil Jackson is a bad coach.  It’s just so clear that he was given the easiest of situations to work with for his entire career.  If he does come back to the Lakers, it will just be more of the same thing.

All of my Laker-hating comes from being a fan though.  I do acknowledge how great of a team they are, but I just can’t stand the arrogance and lack of sportsmanship that their players, coaches, “fans,” and the rest of the organization as a whole represent.  Regardless of who takes over the coaching duties, I hope to see the team’s struggles continue.  Let’s see how long their next coach can hang on for.