For the first time in 6 years, the Los Angeles Lakers will be coached by a person who has not won an NBA Championship.
Think ‘Lakers’ and you think of Mikan and West, Wilt and Kareem, Magic and Showtime, Kobe and Shaq, Riles and Phil, the Forum, the Laker Girls… the Championships. But think ‘Frank Hamblen’ and all you have is a mental picture of an old guy shuffling along behind Phil Jackson on the bench, and a vague memory of the time he stepped in as interim coach of the Milwaukee Bucks about 15 years ago and lead them straight from playoff contention to the lottery. Will the same happen this time?
After scuppering the bulk of the squad that made the 2004 NBA Finals last summer, Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak needed to find a big name coach. He needed to show Kobe, and the league, and the people of LA, that the Lakers were not only serious about winning but serious about being a blue riband franchise. Sure, he traded Shaq, alienated Payton and allowed Jackson to walk… but without a marquee name on the sidelines, the rest of the NBA would no longer see the once-all powerful Lakers as a threat.
Rudy T was the right man. The former Houston Rockets player, scout and head coach, Tomjanovich was not only available, he was in possessesion of 2 championship rings and an impeccable reputation for player relations. That’s a tick in every box. He was no untried, untested coaching virgin. He was no volatile, irascible coaching dictator. He was no risk.
The only problem was, he couldn’t cope.
In his news conference this morning, Tomjanovich admitted “About a month ago, some of the pressure, some of the things that come with coaching started to affect me physically and emotionally. It just seemed like I got deeper and deeper into not feeling good. Why this happened now and why my body changed, I don’t have an answer.”
It’s common for anybody, after they encounter (and conquer) major health issues, to come back to realise they’re not quite the same. Even if we’re lucky enough to have not gone through it ourselves, we’ve all experienced it with family and friends; a decline in overall health can often be traced to sometimes quite minor surgical scares a few years prior. The tests say you’re fine, but you feel a little different. And in a sphere such as coaching, where by definition you’re responsible for the outcome of a situation you don’t directly participate in, the peculiar stresses can literally make things untenable.
And that’s, by all accounts, what happened with Rudy T. In opening up in this way to the nation’s press, he’s not weak, he’s being honest to himself, to his family and to the people he works for. The Lakers had lost Kobe, they’d lost their spark, they’d lost 3 games in a row. Rudy first sat out Sunday’s win over Charlotte with what was reported as a stomach virus, and did not attend yesterday’s thumping of the reeling TrailBlazers, prompting a league-wide frenzy of speculation over his coaching future, which was all confirmed this morning.
This whole situation was all so unexpected that even his players were taken aback. Kobe was quoted yesterday as saying “We’re all just as surprised as anybody else. Hopefully, he’ll come back and continue coaching us. If he doesn’t, we’ll have to just kind of go from there. But our main concern is him as a person. The other day at practice when we saw him, he looked kind of dishevelled a little bit and everybody was concerned.”
Despite what everyone is claiming publicly, it is impossible to not consider the thought that Rudy’s health is affected by something substantially more significant than stress, a stomach ache and a sinus infection. But hopefully, that’s all it is. Either way, the Lakers ballclub no longer has him as their head coach, and that’s what matters in the immediate term.
The Lakers are currently sitting in 7th place in the Western Conference playoff picture with a 24-19 record, and have Houston and Minnesota right behind them. It’s a middle-of-the-road position for what has been a middle-of-the-road season; aside from the legitimacy and hype Kobe’s superstar status gives them, the Lakers are every bit an average NBA team. With no timetable set for Bryant’s return, and 9 of their next 13 games on the road, things are going to be tough in the near future for Hamblen and his men. Even with Kobe, the Lakers’ defense wasn’t forcing enough steals, which, along with their mutated offensive sets, conspire to rank them last in the league in assist differential.
Rudy won his debut game as coach of the famous Los Angeles Lakers franchise back on November 2nd, and this may indeed be the high point of his stay in LA. Although the team was a happy one – and it’s testament to Tomjanovich’s skill as a leader and as a person that he, as a Lakers outsider, has become so well loved by the organisation in so short a time – they weren’t able to get on that dominating roll of invincibility that Phil Jackson’s squads always seemed to produce. Two wins here, two losses there, the Lakers were putt-putting through the season in 2nd gear, with one eye on Karl Malone’s shadow in the rear vision mirror, while the rest of the league were waiting to see if, and when, they’d put their foot down.
Then Kobe – who should refrain from playing in games against Cleveland for the rest of his career – literally put his foot down and has been out for 3 weeks as a result, with more to come. Malone’s agent stated late January that he will probably resign. And now Rudy T is gone.
So it will be interesting to see whether Buss, Kupchak and Hamblen go all out for the rest of the season and fight it out with the TWolves, the Rockets, the Nuggets and Clippers for the final playoff spot. It will be interesting to see whether the whispers in today’s LA Times of Phil Jackson returning to the sidelines have any element of truth. And if they’re not, it will be interesting to see whether the Lakers will feel once again thay have to find a big name coach to keep them in the NBA’s spehere of legitimacy.
Even if they do, there’s not many big name coaching options left; Doug Collins? Hubie Brown? Mike Krzyzewski? Kareem, Rambis, Michael Cooper? Or, since there’s only one man who’s ever coached 2 different teams in the same season, why not ask Larry Brown to do it again?
But whoever the job goes to, he will be facing the same pressures that caused Rudy T, a man who won 2 championships, a gold medal, and a coach of the year award, to today announce his resignation as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.
You realize that no one cares, right?
Looks like Assclown cared enough to post that he didn’t care.
I read in The Punch (a book covering the events before and after Kermit Washington crushed Rudy’s face) that Rudy is a recovering alcoholic. Pure speculation, but maybe this gig drove him back to the bottle. Whatever the case, he’s a good guy, and I wish him the best.
As for the Lakers, I wish them the worst, as always.
Heard the same speculation today Robin.
Probably was hitting the bottle and it freaked him out.
Actually, this speculation is completely unfounded and likely untrue. The more likely result is a cancer recurrence or a matter of mental breakdown due to high stress. Regardless, Rudy T. addressed the booze issue and stated it was not a factor.
I think it was a Hubie Brown/Sgt. Murtaugh situation: “I’m getting too old for this sh*t.”
OK, you’re Rudy Tomjanovich and you’ve beaten the bottle and you’ve beaten cancer and now you’re coaching the most glamorous team in the NBA. You have them a little over .500 and your best player is out with a bad ankle. You tell everybody that after wins you go out and have a steak and some french fries and an hour later you’re obsessing over the next game. The losses are tearing you up, and the wins aren’t filling that big hole you have inside of you. You can either quit, tell Kobe to take his destructive personality and stick it, or you can fill that hole with booze, sweet booze! You decide it’s not going to be the booze, so you quit. Can anybody blame you?
It’s the ‘recovering’ bit that’s important here, surely, not the ‘alcoholic’. As long as you’ve recovered, then it’s a good thing, not a bad thing…
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