**LA LAKERS THREAD** Sitting on 17! 2023-2024 offseason begins

Unless the market changes, dude is gone next year (but then again I never thought Bron & KCP would never play together)

Young, cheap contract with years on it, especially if he actually makes plays this post season.
 
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Respect to Kuzma for taking that deal and not making this season about him & his contract.

I’ll always be on his bumper, but this is mega respectable.

Now we just need to convince him HE CANNOT stay in front of 2 gaurds and we making big STRIDES. 😎
 


A call that shaped the battle for LA: The Lakers, Clippers and a coaching story

Frank Vogel’s dream job was waiting for him on the other side of the country. But he wasn’t going to board a plane and fly from his Orlando home to Los Angeles without first talking to the man who had created this unexpected opportunity.

He needed to call Tyronn Lue.

Hours earlier, Lue had turned down the job offer from the Lakers that most everyone assumed he would accept. And now, in the chaotic, second week of May 2019, the Lakers were scrambling. They moved their attention to Vogel, who previously had an agreement to become a top assistant on Lue’s Lakers staff. The top job could be his.

But he wouldn’t go for it without Lue’s blessing.

“Someone is going to take the job,” Lue said to Vogel, according to a source familiar with the call. “Why not you?”

When it all happened — on May 8, 2019 — a chain of events was set off that would alter the course of both Vogel’s and Lue’s careers, as well as L.A.’s two NBA teams. No one could have known that out of this turmoil, everyone involved would eventually get what they wanted.

On Tuesday night, Vogel will walk toward center court at Staples Center as the Lakers’ champion head coach, claiming the diamond-crusted ring he earned in that job.

Lue will be there but as head coach of the Clippers, the Lakers’ opponent to open the season.

After a decade of missteps and black eyes, the Lakers won their 17th championship with Vogel, who captured his first career title after being fired twice in a period of three years. Lue spent a second season away from being a head coach, but he found his way to L.A. anyway on a team that would eventually award him with the contract and support befitting an NBA Finals-winning coach.

A single phone call reshaped the so-called “Battle for L.A.,” and its impact will be felt in the league’s power structure for years. A dozen sources spoke to The Athletic on the condition of anonymity so they could speak freely about private deliberations to explain how Vogel, Lue, the Lakers and even the Clippers arrived at this point. The entirety of this report is based on their accounts.

The Lakers were stuck in an endless cycle of public shaming in the spring of 2019. Having missed the playoffs for six years running, they bore witness to LeBron James’ first season in Los Angeles being an injury-plagued disaster. They missed the postseason, again.

They had flirted with trading for Anthony Davis by dangling every young player they had, and that blew up in their face. Luke Walton quit as coach rather than fire his assistants and become a lame duck. Even Magic Johnson quit as team president.

Much of the blame was falling at the feet of embattled executive Rob Pelinka, and now the coach he was expected to hire to replace Walton was walking away, too. “****,” one person close to the process remembered thinking. “This is going to be another thing on the list.”

There were two front-runners for the Lakers’ coaching gig: Lue and Monty Williams. The franchise lost out on Williams when he accepted the Phoenix Suns’ offer to be their head coach. Juwan Howard, a former college teammate of Pelinka who won a pair of championships with James in Miami, was the third candidate to initially interview.

Lue, a former Lakers player, seemed like the obvious choice for a franchise reshaping itself around James. As everybody knows, Lue and LeBron won a championship together in Cleveland in 2016 and reached the next two finals after that. The Cavaliers fired Lue just six games into his first season without James in 2018.

The offer from the Lakers was not negotiable: three years, $18 million. Lue was seeking something closer to the five-year, $35 million contract he received from Cleveland after winning a title.

Also, the Lakers wanted to help Lue select his assistant coaches, and that frustrated him. Lue was stunned, sources said, when he met with the Lakers’ deep thinkers for the first time (prior to any contract discussions) and Kurt Rambis, a senior adviser to Pelinka and team owner Jeanie Buss, asked Lue if he would accept him — Rambis — on Lue’s bench.

The Lakers, through a spokeswoman, denied Rambis asked Lue about coaching with him.

“Ty felt like they were doing everything in their power to get him to not take the job,” one source said. “Offer him less years, less money, stir up the pot with some of these other things. They knew they had to interview him because LeBron wanted him, but they were hoping he would walk away.”

In any negotiation, each side has its starting point. Lue, believing he could get to a better place on the details with the Lakers, began work on a compromise for his staff. He didn’t know Vogel well but admired his work as coach of the Indiana Pacers, where Vogel’s lead assistant had been Lue’s former teammate and close friend, Brian Shaw.

Lue and Vogel are also represented by the same CSE sports agency, and at CSE’s urging, Lue interviewed Vogel for a top spot on his bench. The two hit it off, and both were prepared to work together in Los Angeles.

But Lue couldn’t advance any other part of the negotiation. For him, it wasn’t just the years or the money or staff considerations. It was all of the above. He had to weigh what the Lakers were offering, rigidly, against the approximately $7 million he would lose out of the $10 million remaining on his deal with the Cavs if he accepted the Lakers’ offer.

“Ty wanted to be respected as a championship-winning coach,” said a source close to the situation. “He was right, but you also have to respect Ty for protecting the coaches who come after him. If he just says ‘yes’ to the years and any dollar amount the Lakers say, it sets a bad precedent.

“You also can understand where the Lakers were coming from at the time,” the same source said. “They wanted to protect themselves. They’d come up short, they were under a lot of pressure from fans and the media and they were fighting a perception that they didn’t want, which was that LeBron was running the show.”

In NBA coaching circles, you are often only as good as your last job.

Vogel led Indiana for five seasons in which the Pacers collided in the playoffs with James and the Heat three straight seasons, including twice in the Eastern Conference finals. But he was fired in 2016 after Indiana was bounced in the first round and had missed the playoffs the year before. In subsequent seasons in Orlando, his teams failed to win even 30 games, and he was fired again in 2018.

A stint on Lue’s bench coaching LeBron in L.A. would help Vogel freshen up his resume so other teams would start seeing him as a prime candidate again. But when Lue pulled out and the Lakers called to set up an interview with Vogel for the top job, they weren’t terribly concerned with what had gone down in Orlando.

“Everybody was more focused on his Indiana days and the success he’d had there,” a source close to the situation said.

Pelinka initially focused on making a “name” hire, and either Williams or Lue would fit the bill. But when Williams accepted the job in Phoenix, it put Pelinka in an uncomfortable situation. A hallmark of his management style is that he likes to have options. Options mean leverage. With Williams out of the picture, he had neither.

Pelinka was frustrated by the growing external sense that he had to hire Lue. He felt like the organization should choose a coach, rather than let the circumstances dictate the hire.

With the two leading candidates having spurned the Lakers and the draft lottery just days away, the Lakers pivoted quickly. Vogel interviewed on May 9, one day after Lue withdrew.

To this point, all of Vogel’s dealings had been with Lue. He had not yet interviewed with the Lakers in any capacity.

Waiting for him in Los Angeles would be Pelinka, the next wave of Buss siblings, Lakers executives Joey and Jesse Buss, as well as Kurt and Linda Rambis, and Tim Harris, the Lakers’ president of business operations.

They had flown to Philadelphia to interview Williams and met with Howard and Lue in L.A. Jason Kidd interviewed separately with Pelinka and Rambis in what was generally considered a getting-to-know-you for an eventual assistant position.

At least one person in the room was not a complete stranger to Vogel. The presence of Rambis, unsettling to Lue, likely helped move Vogel to the front of the line. The two had a relationship that dated to the 2005-06 season when Vogel worked as an advance scout for the Lakers.

More recently, they had crossed paths when Vogel was one of three candidates who interviewed for the Knicks’ opening in 2016. He was known at the time to have made a good impression on Phil Jackson. It went well enough that Vogel later told the New York Daily News he was surprised he didn’t get the job.

Rambis was not formally part of the Knicks’ interview, but he was never far from Jackson’s orbit.

Though Jackson and Jeanie Buss called off their long-term engagement in 2016, Rambis remained a close adviser to Jackson, and Linda a confidante of Buss.

If Jackson approved of Vogel, that would carry weight with the Lakers power brokers. And maybe even give him a leg up in an interview. When his moment came, Vogel worked on a whiteboard inside the Lakers’ practice facility, laying out the case that he could build a championship-level defense around James. And this was more than a month before the Lakers acquired Davis.

As they did with Lue, the Lakers laid out a plan for his coaching staff. This was not the red flag for Vogel that it had been for Lue. In fact, it mirrored what Larry Bird had done in Indiana in 2011 when he hired the then-37-year-old as head coach. It was at Bird’s urging that Vogel hired veteran assistants in Shaw and Jim Boylen.

Here, it would be Kidd and Lionel Hollins. Phil Handy, the third assistant on the front of the bench, was brought aboard later in the summer.

The day after Vogel’s interview, a Friday, Buss called a meeting with the seven members of the search committee. Pelinka and Kurt Rambis said it was their recommendation that they hire Vogel. No one protested. Word of Vogel’s hiring leaked on Saturday.

In the end, none of the factors that drove Lue away were removed from the equation for Vogel, who was not in much of a position to quibble with the Lakers’ terms. He had not been a prime candidate for a head coaching position since being fired in Orlando. And here was an opportunity to potentially win a championship with LeBron. That was all he needed to know.

Vogel was introduced on May 20, the same day Johnson appeared on ESPN and accused Pelinka of “backstabbing.” A few hours later, Vogel sat by Pelinka’s side as the Lakers general manager sat through an interrogation of the franchise’s practices.

Eventually, Vogel, the supposed man of the hour, came to Pelinka’s defense, saying “the perception of our organization is very far from reality.”

Later, speaking with a gaggle of reporters, Vogel was asked about Lue and whether he believed, like the rest of the basketball world, that the job was all but his.

“Ty and I share an agent, so I knew he was involved,” Vogel said. “And I supported that. He’s a great coach, a championship coach. When he talked to me about potentially coming onto his staff, I was honored for the opportunity to work with him. But this opportunity here with the Lakers … you just want to be a part of something like this. It’s not about anything else. When he pulled out, they moved very quickly to getting me into L.A. for an interview. And moved quickly in terms of offering me the job.”

Vogel was not the splashy hire Pelinka might have been initially searching for, but he turned out to be the perfect coach for the Lakers. After months in which the Lakers more closely resembled a P.E. class with a substitute teacher than a professional basketball organization, Vogel represented the first step toward stability.

He said he would build an elite defense, and he did. The Lakers ranked third in the NBA in the regular season. But even more importantly, Vogel coaxed greater regular season effort out of James than Lue had been able to do in any of their four seasons together in Cleveland.

The Lakers won 24 of their first 27 games in Vogel’s first season. And when it ended, after twists of turmoil and tragedy, Vogel did, in fact, win that championship with LeBron.

Lue was frustrated and disappointed — but not, like, crushed — when he turned away from the Lakers. He’s not one to dwell, and if he wanted to get back into coaching, there were opportunities.

David Griffin, the executive who hired Lue in Cleveland and then promoted him to head coach, wanted him to come to New Orleans to not only be on then-Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry’s bench but also to likely replace Gentry at some point during the season.

There is no NBA front-office leader to whom Lue is closer than Griffin, but the idea of potentially being hired to replace a colleague Lue knew and respected, and who wasn’t fired yet, was off-putting to him. He chose to take the offer from his mentor, Doc Rivers, who gave him a start in coaching, and joined the Clippers’ bench as Rivers’ assistant.

Lue waded into his role with the Clippers gingerly. Rivers already had two chief assistants in Rex Kalamian and Sam Cassell. If there was advice to be given for a specific scheme — like guarding LeBron against the Lakers — or an in-game adjustment to be offered, Lue could provide it. Also, the Clippers added two superstars in Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, and Lue’s pedigree as a relatable players’ coach with a track record of coaching stars made him a good fit.

Before August was out, while the Clippers were battling in the playoffs at Disney World, there were at least three high-profile coaching vacancies to which Lue’s name was tied: The Brooklyn Nets, the Philadelphia 76ers and Griffin’s Pelicans. A fourth team, the Houston Rockets, were considered another possibility if Mike D’Antoni didn’t return. As Lue strolled the hallways and held court with players and coaches from around the league at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort most nights, the question seemed to be which job he’d get.

But on Sept. 3, the Nets shocked the league by hiring former MVP Steve Nash, who had no real experience coaching on the bench. People close to Lue believed he was never really a candidate in Brooklyn, even though he had privately expressed interest in the job and had the blessings of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant.

Two weeks later, the Clippers blew a 3-1 lead in their second-round series with the Denver Nuggets, losing Game 7 in embarrassing fashion and earning a ticket home from the bubble earlier than expected. Lue was now free to travel wherever he wished for interviews, but those invites were slow to materialize. The Sixers finally set up an interview with Lue for Sept. 29, but it was already clear that momentum was not on his side.

Lue had an ally in the Sixers’ search — super agent Rich Paul, who represents James (hence his ties to Lue) and Philadelphia star Ben Simmons. But sources across the NBA said the Sixers’ other star, Joel Embiid, ultimately opposed Lue as coach for X’s and O’s reasons and for the optics of Simmons’ “guy” getting the job.

The Clippers fired Rivers on a Monday, Sept. 28, while Lue was in Philadelphia getting ready for his interview there. On Tuesday, Lue spoke with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and team president Lawrence Frank, who conveyed to him their interest in him as a candidate to succeed Rivers. Lue said he was flattered and, under any other set of circumstances, would share their interest, but in this particular case, much like Vogel had asked Lue for his blessing 16 months earlier, Lue first wanted the OK from Rivers — whom he knew to be hurt over the firing the day before.

What Lue didn’t know yet was that Rivers was on a plane headed for Philadelphia to interview with the Sixers on Wednesday.

In the matter of about three days, Rivers went from fired in Los Angeles to hired by the Sixers. Lue, suddenly, was the chief candidate to be the Clippers’ coach.

The Clippers cleared their schedule for Lue to interview that weekend, starting with dinner Friday night between Lue and Frank and then a six-hour interview Saturday.

Before he made it to L.A., Lue had been joined for dinner that Thursday night in Las Vegas by Griffin and the Pelicans’ second in command, general manager Trajan Langdon.

Griffin and Lue, old friends, had a few items to discuss. Namely, should Lue be considered a candidate at all in New Orleans? The Pels’ job was different than what the Clippers or even Rockets were offering. Yes, Zion Williamson is there, but New Orleans is at least a few years away from serious contention. Was Lue comfortable with taking on more of a player-development job than trying to win a ring straight away, which is the expectation with the Clippers?

The answer to that question played out before our eyes. Lue is the Clippers’ coach now, and Stan Van Gundy was hired to coach the Pelicans on Oct. 21 — six days after Lue took the Clippers’ job.

Ballmer was among the Clippers’ executives who grilled Lue during that marathon Saturday session. They all wanted to know how he would do things differently than Rivers. What schematically would change? And how did Lue intend to manage the obvious chemistry issues on the team? Ballmer wanted to interview other candidates, but the feeling was shared throughout the building that Lue was probably the right hire.

Lue interviewed with the Rockets on Oct. 12 and was the preferred candidate of James Harden and Russell Westbrook, sources said, but Daryl Morey, the team’s longtime general manager, was on his way out of Houston. It was becoming clear Lue had more work to do to get the Rockets job, whereas the Clippers were prepared to make an offer. On the day news broke that the Clippers hired Lue (Oct. 15), it was reported that Morey’s tenure with the Rockets was over.

Lue secured the five-year contract he wanted from the Clippers. Financial terms were not disclosed. By waiting a year to take another head-coaching job, he didn’t forfeit any of the money he was owed from his Cleveland contract. He is coaching in Los Angeles, with two stars on his roster and a chance to go to the NBA Finals.

So long as he can beat the guy who picked up the phone and asked if it was OK to interview with the Lakers.
 
I can see tonight being ugly

Lebron will be sluggish after super short break. (Remember game 1 last year?)

ad will ball out.

lakers gonna get complacent after banner goes up.

clippers will be hungry

Clippers by 9 tonight but doesn’t mean anything
We will see some head scratching lineups today from Vogel as he still tries to figure out his team.
 
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