The Lakers Speculation Machine is already revved up with their first LeBron James-led season all but over. LA Clippers head coach Doc Rivers has been a name bandied about to replace the quite-obviously-outgoing Luke Walton for the Lakers, but if they think that’s going to happen, they might want to seek help.
You need only to go on Twitter and search “Doc Rivers Lakers” to see — Lakers Twitter has been demanding this for a good portion of the year as Luke Walton fell out of favor. And now, according to a report from Peter Vecsey, Magic Johnson may be expressing an interest in hiring Doc Rivers out from under the LA Clippers.
To be fair, this is not exactly the most reliable source of information. A cursory search of his past tweets have shown that Vecsey has, uh, a very weird focus on Rivers. But that hasn’t stopped other outlets from taking it and running with it willy-nilly. Marc Stein also seems to think this is worthy of your attention. So fine, we’re going to talk about it.
So let me be clear — I really doubt that Magic Johnson on behalf of the Lakers is going to make any headway in getting Doc Rivers to leave this Clippers team. And if he at all thinks otherwise, he’s absolutely delusional.
In an earlier piece, I outlined the construction of the front office as critical for the development of this LA Clippers team, and Doc Rivers factors heavily into it. While Doc stepped down as President of Basketball Ops, he is still a major component in the decision making process.
Largely, when these stories and rumors abound, it really tells on themselves how little they actually have paid attention to the Clippers organization, how it is constructed, and how it operates today. It’s rather clear the assumption is that the Clippers are as they always have been: a JV squad in Los Angeles that other teams can use as their personal piggy bank.
That hasn’t been the case for several years. There is also an assumption that the front office is all the machinations of Jerry West or maybe even Lawrence Frank in tandem with West. Single names are put out on an island and viewed as the only “mastermind” in play.
Maybe that’s true for other teams — the Lakers’ Pelinka/Johnson tandem comes to mind. Maybe it’s brought up because it’s a cleaner narrative than the one that is the reality: That Steve Ballmer has built an ecosystem of checks and balances within the LA Clippers organization that makes the front office (including himself!) operate as cooperatively and cohesively as the team does on the court.
How else do you keep Doc around in the middle of a rebuild?
We can probably dispense quickly with the reasoning, one that everyone can see a mile away: “The Lakers are the Lakers, and who doesn’t want to play or work for them?” We’ve seen in recent seasons that the answer has been actually, a lot of people don’t.
The Lakers needed to bring shooters in around LeBron. They got Mike Muscala.
Doc Rivers has built a team with the pieces acquired by the front office — of which he is a part — and that team is one that plays his style of basketball: hard nosed, unselfish, with players that would be unsung on other rosters being valued as important pieces of a cohesive unit. Even after the Tobias Harris trade, the team has continued to win, emphasizing the entire squad working together being more important than any single player.
(Don’t get us wrong, we love and miss Tobias, Boban Marjanovic and whiskey-stealing Mike Scott.)
In every single way, the team’s identity, an identity that Doc was instrumental in building, is the antithesis of their neighbors.
Just as they are forming into an impressive team that’s about to go into the playoffs this season and possibly a deeper playoff run (if not a conference finals run) next season, it’s laughable to think that he would pull up sticks and go next door to a team of dysfunction, with a front office that just wasted a year of LeBron’s fading prime. (And also, in Doc’s words, dipped out on D’Angelo Russell too early.)
And just as a final nail in that idea’s coffin: Doc literally just signed an extension to his contract in May. He’s in it for the relative long haul. It’s also reported that Doc is making around $11 million a season. Whatever the Lakers think they can offer him, Steve Ballmer can and will double it without a second thought. After the way Jeanie Buss has treated Ballmer? You think he won’t just to do it?
To think you can yank a head coach who’s happy with his situation right now, who is clearly having the most fun he’s had since his Heart & Hustle season (his words, not ours), especially when you can’t outspend the team he’s with, just reeks of entitlement.
To think that Doc is going to develop a young core like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Landry Shamet, Ivica Zubac and then right as they get going, turn around and go to the team that gave Zubac away for a stick of gum is the sort of confused thinking that makes one wonder if you’re even fit to be in the front office.
It’s the sort of thing you can do while you’re winning those banners you like to remind people of. It’s not the sort of thing you can do while wasting the time of one of the greatest players to grace a basketball court after five years of mediocrity.
When Doc says “thanks, but no thanks,” don’t say we didn’t warn you.