Every game, every moment, Byron Scott seems to be proving to his employers, the Los Angeles Lakers, and to everyone else, he has no business being an NBA head coach, or maybe anywhere near an NBA team anymore. Yet somehow, he still has a job doing exactly that.
The Lakers losing 120-101 to the Phoenix Suns isn’t such a surprise. The Lakers are one of the worst teams in the league, with or without Kobe Bryant. But for a second consecutive season, it looks like Scott is doing everything in his power to ruin games for the Lakers by making the wrong decisions with the game on the line.
Just before we go on: Maybe the Lakers are tanking, and there’s some direct order from above to lose, lose and lose some more while keeping up appearances. Maybe Scott is simply playing a role and taking the shots as the fall guy. But he’s been in the league for quite enough time and it’s been a very long while since he’s done anything productive on the sidelines.
Scott actually seems to dislike his players, except for Bryant and Metta World Peace. Every opportunity he gets is used to throw the young players under the bus and complain about how bad they are on offense, defense, individually and as a team. His latest “fatherly” rant was about fatigue not being a part of their losses. Playing back to back for the second time in a week isn’t easy, but the Lakers are bad with or without the rest.
I keep hearing about this back to back. o me, that is a bunch of crap. It really is. It’s basketball. You come ready to play. I thought our guys gave an effort but I thought their effort was 10 times better. They seemed to want it a lot more than we didn’t tonight.
Another interesting glimpse at his mockery of a head coaching job can be seen through the tweet of Darius Soriano. Scott played his starting lineup together for 14 minutes in this game (Russell, Clarkson, Randle, Hibbert, World Peace). During those minutes, they had a 123.9 offensive efficiency and a 95.7 defensive efficiency. For some reason, that group of five players was never together for a single second in the fourth quarter.
Maybe there’s more to meet the eye in this situation, who knows. But we can only write about what we see, and it’s not hard to figure out Scott is doing a terrible job as a head coach of a team that might not be very good, but under the hands of a more competent coach could be doing a little bit better.