The Los Angeles Lakers are 10-11 this season and Laker fans are upset. This is a team that was expected to be the favorites in the Western Conference and instead they have played poor basketball and have lost to teams that they have no business losing to.
The Lakers have had one of the easiest schedules in the league thus far this season and still have a sub-.500 level. Excellence is expected out of the purple and gold and seeing the team play like this, while other teams thrive, is extremely worrisome.
The frustration has seemed to boil over after Friday night as the Lakers lost in triple overtime to the Sacramento Kings. Disgruntled fans have had enough and there has been significant momentum in the fanbase’s desire for the team to fire Frank Vogel.
Firing Frank Vogel is pointless for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Frank Vogel has been far from perfect and this is by no means an article that is meant to be a piece defending Vogel. He can absolutely be better. That being said, firing him is an extreme move that simply does not make a lot of sense for the team.
I know that those who want him fired are going to disagree and it might be hard to convince you otherwise. That is why I have broken this argument down into three main points that can help upset Laker fans realize that the grass is not always greener on the other side.
Let’s dive into the first point of why firing Frank Vogel would be pointless for the Los Angeles Lakers.
1. Firing Frank Vogel won’t change a single thing for the Los Angeles Lakers
Sports fans often have to find excuses for their team’s poor play instead of sometimes just admitting that the team is not as good as we expected. I am guilty of it all the time and this is something that Laker fans are doing to cope with the fact that this team is underwhleming.
There is always going to be multiple sources of blame before fans realize that the team is just not that good and the first source of blame is the head coach. Again, has Frank Vogel been perfect? Not at all. There are certain changes that he absolutely has to make moving forward. That being said, will firing him change anything? Not at all.
This team is not struggling because of Frank Vogel. Fans may hate to hear this but this team is struggling because it is not well put together. In fact, this is more on Rob Pelinka than it is Vogel as he has given him a roster that simply does not work.
First of all, the depth of the team is not even close to what we expected it to be. The Lakers bright in a lot of one-trick ponies who don’t play defense and only shoot threes. The result has been the team turning into one of the worst defensive teams in the league while having nine (of 13) players with a negative Box Plus/Minus.
That means that only four players have been “above-average” this season. That is not a formula for winning basketball.
The depth of this team is a problem and Russell Westbrook simply does not fit. He is a turnover machine that demands a high usage rate and forced the team to go out and only sign veteran-minimum shooters because they traded all of their depth for a guy who is probably the second-most overpaid player in the league behind John Wall.
This is not a Frank Vogel problem, it is a roster problem. The team can fire Frank Vogel and bring back prime Phil Jackson and they are not going to play much better than they currently are. This brings us to the second point…
2. The Los Angeles Lakers have no better alternative to Frank Vogel!
I have one question for any fan that wants Frank Vogel to be fired. Who does the team bring in to replace him this season? If you do not have an answer to that question then you probably can’t ask for the team to fire him. It is only worth firing a coach if there is a better option to replace him and there is not a better option.
Vogel gets that benefit of the doubt because he just won a championship 13 months ago with this team by orchestrating the rotation in the playoffs perfectly. He pulled all the right strings in the Orlando bubble and people have already forgotten. This isn’t Luke Walton where he has not accomplished anything. This is an accomplished coach and if you are going to fire him there better be a better replacement.
The counterargument to this point is to fire Frank Vogel and simply elevate David Fizdale to interim head coach for the rest of the season. While Fizdale is a former head coach and is easy to talk yourself into, the truth of the matter is that he won’t be much better than Vogel.
First of all, Fizdale is already on the staff that is helping determine the rotations that Laker fans are complaining about. Fizdale has a say in what the team is doing and firing Vogel and elevating him is not going to drastically change anything, if at all.
Second, Fizadale’s track record is not good. He has not been a good head coach so why should we expect him to take over a job midseason and suddenly be different from the rest of his career? Fizdale has four seasons as a head coach under his belt. He made the playoffs once and was fired during two of those seasons. His career record as head coach is 71-134.
Sure, he coached a bad Knicks team but he didn’t do anything with his previous chance with the Memphis Grizzlies. He took over the 2016-17 Grizzlies and there was no improvement. They were one game better than the year before and lost in the first round of the playoffs, just like the year before. He was then fired only 19 games into the following season after a 7-12 start.
Fizdale is not any better than Vogel and there are not many other options out there. If you think a 76-year-old Phil Jackson is going to take over a team midseason after not coaching for a decade then that just shows how bleak the market is.
3. The Los Angeles Lakers are not in a place to fire Frank Vogel
You know who fires head coaches during the season? Bad teams who don’t have much of a chance at the NBA Championship. The Los Angeles Lakers are not expecting to be a bad team and still want to contend for an NBA Championship.
Thus, firing Vogel should not be an option. The team is simply going to have to stick it out and hope they figure it out this year for the reasons already mentioned in the article. If they want to fire him after the season then fine, go right ahead. Firing him during the season only decreases the Lakers’ championship chances.
It decreases the chances for the two reasons already outlined but history also shows us that firing a head coach is essentially punting on the NBA Championship. An interim head coach has never won the NBA Championship, with the closest example being Paul Westhead with the 1980 Lakers.
That is a completely different situation, though. That was not a case of someone being fired and Westhead being promoted from assistant to head coach. Westhead became head coach because Jack McKinney was injured in a bicycle accident and could not coach.
Nate McMillan did get to the Eastern Conference Finals last season with the Atlanta Hawks after taking over the team halfway through the season. That is absolutely a fair point, but again, the Lakers do not have that luxury.
McMillan was a veteran head coach with a ton of experience that could help the young Hawks team. The Lakers’ only option is David Fizdale, who has been called by some as one of the worst NBA head coaches of all time.
It’s frustrating, I get it, but the Los Angeles Lakers are likely going to hold onto Frank Vogel and fans are going to have to accept it. If the team does fire him at some point, that might be admitting defeat on the 2021-22 season.