Report: Lakers are ‘torn’ about retaining Byron Scott as coach

If it were just about any other team – you always have to make concessions for Sacramento – this would be a no-brainer. Of course Byron Scott shouldn’t be coaching the Los Angeles Lakers next season.

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He’s fine for this year. Sure, it’s possible that he’s poisoning the well with youngsters D’Angelo Russell and Julius Randle, but the Lakers need to lose games in order to retain their lottery pick, and adding an interim head coach to the bench would only make Kobe Bryant’s farewell tour all the more unseemly. Bryant, a teammate of Scott’s during his Kobe’s rookie year, would probably prefer to have some sense of consistency as he attempts to finish a season in full health for the first time in four years.

Beyond that, though, you’ve got to get rid of the guy, right? The coach that has presided over some of the worst defenses the NBA has seen, routinely, since 2010? A man who can’t get out of his way when it comes to addressing the shortcomings of first-year players that aren’t legally allowed to buy beer?

Not so fast, it seems. From Mike Bresnahan at the Los Angeles Times:

The franchise seems torn on whether he’ll return for the third and last guaranteed year on his contract.

He is expected to coach the rest of this season, and some within the organization wonder what Scott might do with a better roster. The one he has now has produced an 11-44 record, second-worst in the NBA.

Others, however, wonder about the effectiveness of the tough love he administers to the team’s many young players.

“Others.” The Los Angeles Lakers have been and will forever be amongst the “others.”

This is a legendary, billion-dollar franchise that is still run as a family operation, the only such structure of its ilk in the NBA – something that is just fine, in a vacuum. The team employs a former Laker player, an apprentice to the general manager that built the team’s early-2000s champions, as GM. That GM, Mitch Kupchak, struggled in his attempts to carry on Jerry West’s legacy of providing depth around Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, helping cost the Lakers championships in 2003 and 2004 and very nearly in 2002.

He rebounded, due to some very good timing, by acquiring Pau Gasol for pennies on the dollar in 2008 and the Lakers responded with three title runs and two rings, but each of the team’s “of course I want to play in Los Angeles”-veteran acquisitions (Gary Payton, Karl Malone, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash) have fallen flat over the course of his run.

It probably isn’t Kupchak’s fault that the Lakers have done terribly with their coaching hires in the years since Phil Jackson decided he’d had enough with the franchise run by his fiancée and long time partner and walked away from the mess in 2011. Basketball president Jim Buss had a big hand in the hiring of Mike Brown – a year removed from presiding over underachieving Cleveland Cavalier teams that were dominated in ways both bad and good by LeBron James – and his replacement Mike D’Antoni.

D’Antoni was hired mostly because of the presence of Nash, as the Buss family hoped to re-ignite a bit of Showtime with the future Hall of Famer on board. The franchise didn’t notice that Nash’s Suns had been dipping in pace as the point guard’s career moved along, nearly out of the top ten in his final season in Phoenix, to say nothing of the fact that Nash would turn 39 midway through D’Antoni’s first season with the Lakers.

The next coaching choice was Scott, sought out to stand over Kobe’s remaining years as the team took in loss after loss and lottery pick after lottery pick. The Lakers aren’t guaranteed to keep their next one, if records hold steady the team has a slightly better than average chance at retaining it, and if bad luck hits and it falls out of the top three (the Lakers have the second-worst record in the NBA) the selection will head to Philadelphia.

Say the Lakers keep the pick. Say they draft a stud to pair with Russell and Randle, Kobe sets sail and the team intelligently uses what should be over $50 million in cap space. Not on an in-prime guy like DeMar DeRozan – someone who would be past his best ball by the time the youngsters are approaching their finest days – but on younger contributors while facilitating trades and earning more stashable draft assets. Say they do the right things.

Do the Lakers want Byron Scott running that ship, in the final year of his contract (the four-year deal Scott signed in 2014 has a team option for 2017-18), no less?

Apparently they’re “torn.”

It’s understandable that Los Angeles would be wary of eating more coaching money. The team was set to pay the final three years of Mike Brown’s contract until the Cleveland Cavaliers strangely decided to re-hire him (thus taking the financial responsibility off their hands), and paid Mike D’Antoni the final $4 million on his deal after his “resignation.” Paying two coaches at once, even for a franchise that is handing Kobe Bryant $25 million this year, is weirdly an anathema for many NBA teams.

Still, Scott’s contract would represent about 4.3 percent of next year’s salary cap, and that’s just pretending that coaching salaries actually count against the cap. For a team raking in billions in TV revenue, mind you.

For a coach that hasn’t hesitated in the slightest in calling his players out publicly, while handing Kobe Bryant the most shots per game (even at just 29 minutes per game) on a team that badly needs development and to turn those TV ratings around with a winner. Even in Kobe’s farewell tour, people aren’t clicking over to see Scott’s Lakers play.

Finish the season? No doubt. There’s no real point in pretending that this team was ever going to be any good, especially with Kobe still at 35 percent from the floor. Yes, we expected better than a 17-win pace, but at least the team will get to keep its draft pick!

Don’t let Byron Scott coach that draft pick.

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops