Phil Jackson is not happy he didn't get more time for a decison, and Lakers fans will need time to process the stunning move
12:06AM EST November 13. 2012 - LOS ANGELES — The saga surrounding the surprising hiring of Mike D'Antoni, and not Phil Jackson, to be the Los Angeles Lakers' next coach continues to unravel.
The story will remain front and center for now, in part, because D'Antoni isn't even here yet. A recent knee replacement surgery is making travel difficult for D'Antoni, and team officials said he was trying to make the trip from his home in the New York area to Los Angeles by Wednesday in time to possibly coach against his old Phoenix Suns team Friday night.
Adding to the strangeness of Monday at Lakers camp in addition to D'Antoni not being there, the two most obvious Lakers who could put a positive spin on his hiring — Kobe Bryant and Steve Nash — had departed the Lakers training facility before news reporters were allowed in.
OFFENSIVE: Lakers should thrive in D'Antoni's system
Nash won two MVP awards playing in D'Antoni's system with the Suns and said in recent days that a reunion with his old coach would be fine by him.
Bryant chose No. 8 for his original Lakers jersey number because, when he was a kid growing up in Italy, where his father played in the pro league, his basketball hero was a crafty point guard named Mike D'Antoni, who wore No. 8 for one of the Italian league teams.
That left forward Pau Gasol, who never played on a team coached by D'Antoni, as the most veteran Laker available.
"Everybody had expectations, and they were all pretty high," Gasol said at Monday's practice of the feeling that Jackson was on his way back. "We understand what Phil brings to the table and how successful he's been and what he means to the city and the franchise. But it couldn't happen, for whatever reason, so we move forward. That's what we do as professionals."
HAPPY THOUGHTS: Lakers positive about D'Antoni hire
This all began when the team fired second-year coach Mike Brown on Friday, just five games into the season. Expectations were sky high after a whirlwind offseason that saw the superstar acquisitions of Nash and center Dwight Howard, Brown sealed his fate with a 1-4 start. Interim coach Bernie Bickerstaff, who'll coach the team for the final time today against San Antonio, is 2-0 thus far in his brief stint.
CONFUSION IN LAKER LAND
Meanwhile Jackson's camp claims the job was his, that Lakers officials said as much in an interview in his home on Saturday in which — as Jackson said in a statement — he was told to make up his mind by Monday. Instead, he was informed of the D'Antoni hire in a midnight phone call from Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak that jarred both him and the team's fan base that had spent the previous two days chanting "We want Phil" at the team's Staples Center home games.
"(Kupchak) told me that the Lakers had signed Mike D'Antoni to a three-year agreement and that they felt he was the best coach for the team," Jackson said in the statement. "The decision is, of course, theirs to make."
FULL STATEMENT: Read Jackson's words here
Meanwhile, the question of why Jackson hadn't been chosen wasn't answered because Kupchak and vice president Jim Buss, the son of owner Jerry Buss, didn't address the news media on Monday.
Team officials said the decision had to do with a belief that D'Antoni's up-tempo offense was a better fit for this group than Jackson's triangle, but his representatives and longtime friend and assistant Kurt Rambis strongly denied speculation that Jackson had asked for too much in negotiations and eventually led to his own undoing.
"No money was discussed (in Jackson's interview on Saturday)," Rambis, the former Minnesota Timberwolves head coach who was expected to rejoin Jackson's staff, told USA TODAY Sports. "All of these things that are out there about partial ownership, and lack of travel (for Jackson), and no practice time — all of that stuff is categorically false. None of those conversations ever happened. Ever. It was about whether or not he wanted to come and coach the team."
MORE: Rambis weighs in on Lakers
Rambis, who had planned on preparing for a return to Jackson's bench on Monday morning, instead found himself filing live television reports from the parking lot of the team's practice facility as part of his job as a commentator for the team's television network. On that platform and others, he made it known he thinks the Lakers made a mistake.
"If you're talking about having success and having this team and someone who knows how to guide a team to an NBA title, Phil is that guy," he said. "There's no second, third, fourth or fifth choice at this point in time. He's that guy. I don't know if Jim Buss knows one system from another in terms of how it fits with players, or what works best for players, or what's the difference between them. I don't know if he really understands that, so a lot of times decisions are made on gut feelings and with outside sources that have an influence on it."
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D'ANTONI COULD FIT WELL
While Jackson's league-record 11 titles speak for themselves, D'Antoni has a legacy of his own that he'll attempt to grow.
His transformative seven-seconds-or-less offense with the Suns led to a 232-96 regular season mark (70.7%) from 2005 to 2008 as the Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire-led Suns fell in two Western Conference Finals, a semifinal and a quarterfinal.
His three seasons in New York were far less flattering, but largely forgiven because of the dysfunction that surrounded him and the mismatched rosters that hardly ever fit his point guard-reliant system.
NOT PEOPLE'S CHOICE: But Laker Land will like D'Antoni
Jerry Colangelo, the USA Basketball chairman and the Suns' owner when D'Antoni started in Phoenix, said he'll be a good fit because of his already established relationships with Nash, Bryant, Howard and forward Antawn Jamison. D'Antoni was a USA Basketball assistant on teams with the latter trio.
"He knows this personnel pretty well," Colangelo said. "This is not starting from scratch in the sense of building relationships, far from it, and that's a plus."
It is a new system, though, and one in which D'Antoni has neither the depth nor the youth that he had in his glory days with the Suns. Steve Kerr, the TNT analyst who was the Suns general manager during D'Antoni's final days in the desert, said there could be offensive issues.
"This is not (D'Antoni's) ideal roster," he said. "The trickiest part is how you incorporate Pau and Dwight together. In Phoenix, we always had the floor spread, (forward) Amar'e (Stoudemire) rolling to the lane and Steve Nash had all kinds of room to work with. ... Mike is very smart. Maybe he can fix that a little bit."
Jackson drama and all, it's D'Antoni's team to fix now.
Contributing: David Leon Moore in Los Angeles and Jeff Zillgitt
Source: http://www.news.theusalinks.com/2012/11/12/mike-dantoni-hire-wasnt-smooth-but-lakers-found-fill-in-for-phil-jackson/
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