The next few hours will be crucial in defining the future of the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Without the support of the team’s leaders and with the fans questioning him for the poor performance, Darvin Ham depends on the verdict of the leadership to know if he will continue with the franchise or has to leave the City of Stars.

The growing discontent of LeBron James and the rest of the locker room with the team’s performance and the coach’s decisions is straining the Los Angeles franchise.

The Los Angeles Lakers are going through difficult times in the NBA. The most successful franchise with 17 titles – tied with the Boston Celtics – is facing various problems and disagreements between the main figures of the squad and their head coach, Darvin Ham.

The coach arrived at the Lakers’ bench in 2022, a season in which they reached the Western Conference finals, losing 4-0 to the Denver Nuggets, the team that ended up winning the championship.

Despite reaching that stage, the players’ relationship with Ham this season has not been entirely good. According to Shams Charania, one of the NBA’s main insiders, the team’s chemistry with the coach is broken due to differences in tactics. Faced with this rupture, the Los Angeles leadership is debating whether these will be the last days in charge of the team or if he will be confirmed in the institution.

The relationship with Ham has been dragging complex situations since last season. Under his leadership in the 22/23 season, the Lakers finished in the seventh position with a record of 43 wins and 39 losses, barely surpassing the 50% performance barrier.

After beating the Minnesota Timberwolves in the play-in game, Los Angeles did the same by eliminating the Memphis Grizzlies and the Golden State Warriors in the following rounds.

However, one of the moments that revealed the tense relationship between LeBron James and his coach was when, in the middle of a timeout in one of the games against the Dallas Mavericks, the basketball player angrily intervened to get the board that the strategist had to design the play himself.

In addition to this, there is the subsequent sweep that Nikola Jokic and his Denver Nuggets gave them in the conference finals, an instance in which the Lakers had no tactical response to the attacks of the Colorado team.

For this season, the Lakers have once again had a turbulent start. A meager record of 17-18 has them in tenth place in the West, on the verge of missing the postseason. Although the Angelinos have only played 35 games out of 82 possible, the feelings are not good.

In the game on December 30, 2023, against the Timberwolves, LeBron James expressed his frustration with his head coach due to the scheme he proposed for the final play: with 1.4 seconds remaining on the clock, the coach prepared a maneuver that ended in a poorly crafted shot with the opposing defense on top.

James, who scored 26 points and dished out 6 assists that night, wasn’t satisfied with how the team finished that game. ‘Last year, we had 5 or 6 games that were decided like that in the end. We can’t act so foolishly when the announcement comes that there are two minutes left in the game,’ LeBron commented in a press conference when asked about the lack of strategy and leadership to close tight games.

Performance Issues

With 9 losses in the last 12 matchups, the internal questioning within the organization is growing. The disconnect between Ham and his players has alerted the leadership led by Jeanie Buss, increasing doubts about a possible firing of the former NBA player.

According to Charania, the current rift is strictly related to the performance that the coach has implemented during these months. The extreme player rotation and multiple adjustments in the starting lineup have not been to the liking of LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and company.

In Wednesday’s loss to the Miami Heat, the coach used the tenth different lineup of the season. Additionally, the decision to bench D’Angelo Russell in the December 23 game against the Oklahoma City Thunder was a tough blow inside the locker room, as the Lakers took the court without a pure ball distributor to accompany King James.

With continuous changes in the starting five, Ham attributes the crisis to key players’ injuries. ‘When your role players are injured and miss three or four games one after another, that makes everything more difficult. We’re here to explore everything we can to right the ship,’ concluded the coach in a conversation with the American media.

The next few hours will be crucial in defining the future of the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. Without the support of the team’s leaders and with the fans questioning him for the poor performance, Darvin Ham depends on the verdict of the leadership to know if he will continue with the franchise or has to leave the City of Stars.