When the Lakers relieved head coach Mike Brown of his duties on Friday morning, legitimate questions about the timing of such a major decision were certain to arise.
Isn’t the team overreacting a bit after just five games?
The short answers are one, because it was clear that this was going to get worse before it got better, and two, L.A. knew what it had in Brown, and knew even at this early stage of the season that he was not the man for the job.
Firing Brown at this point was not only the right decision, it was the only decision.
The Lakers had an entire season to evaluate Mike Brown as head coach, so if you’re among those pointing to these first five games as too narrow of a window to pass judgment on Brown’s abilities, you’re really only fooling yourself.
L.A. went through a lackluster season a year ago, one filled with as much disappointment or more than there’s been to start things off in 2012. The club wasn’t quite as loaded as it is this year on paper, with new additions Dwight Howard and Steve Nash in the fold. But the Lakers had Kobe Bryant playing at a high level and leading the league in scoring for most of the year, and Andrew Bynum finally making the leap on both ends of the floor to vault himself to the level of NBA All-Star.
Let’s also not forget about Pau Gasol, though his season wasn’t as productive as those in his Lakers past. But the way Brown misused Gasol offensively was glaring, and the fact he couldn’t get him comfortable playing alongside a more ball-dominant Bynum who was getting the bulk of the work in the post might give us some insight into the Lakers’ thinking.
The team had an entire season and five games to realize what anyone who watched Brown’s Cleveland teams should already have known -- that offensively, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The Princeton Offense was a crutch, and one that Brown was willing to hand over to assistant coach Eddie Jordan to run so he could displace blame if things didn’t go according to plan.
No, Brown’s strength was always supposed to be his defensive schemes, but again, with the benefit of an entire season in L.A., we could see that he couldn’t produce there, either. Brown could do no better than coach his team to an efficiency ranking of 17th in the league in that category, and the Lakers are even worse there now, currently sitting at 22nd.
If offense isn’t your thing and you can’t get the team on the same page defensively, then what’s left? Obviously, the answer is to part ways -- and do so sooner, rather than later.
This season is all about bringing another championship to Los Angeles; the Lakers wasted an opportunity to do that last year with Brown in charge, and they weren’t about to waste any more time watching things fall apart just to hope that they would slowly end up coming back together in time for the playoffs.
The Lakers have had plenty of time to evaluate Brown -- there was no overreaction, and the timing was perfect. They made the only decision that made any sense.