The Los Angeles Lakers fired Frank Vogel quickly after the last game of the 2021-22 season and the Lakers rumors about his successor have already started. Heck, there were Lakers rumors about who the team’s next head coach might be before Vogel was eventually canned.
The early reports about who the Lakers are targeting are mostly centered around accomplished head coaches in the league. Shams Charania of The Athletic reported that Toronto Raptors head coach Nick Nurse is among the “top targets” for the purple and gold.
This may seem like a great report for Laker fans who want to see the team sign a quality head coach to replace Vogel moving forward. And while there is no denying that Nurse is a great head coach, there just is no reason to get excited about this report.
The Nick Nurse Lakers rumors are nothing but a pipe dream.
Last we checked, Nick Nurse is still employed by the Toronto Raptors. And after a great bounce-back season that saw the Raptors finish with a 48-34 record as the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference, the chances of the Raptors parting ways with Nurse are slim to none.
The only way that the Lakers could get Nurse would be via trade and why would the Raptors trade Nurse for the limited (bad) assets that the Lakers have? A 2027 first-round pick is not even close to being worth Nurse.
Plus, this is something that Nurse himself would have to leverage, which assumes that he would want to come to the Lakers. Outside of being a big market, why would Nurse want anything to do with LA? The Lakers are coming off of one of the worst seasons in franchise history and coaching LeBron James can be a mess with no job security.
Toronto is in a much better position with great young players. Sure, if everything goes right (that is slim) then the Lakers have a better chance of winning the title next year. But Nurse has already won a title and it is far more likely that the Lakers will be worse than the Raptors yet again next season.
This report means absolutely nothing. Someone from the Lakers building probably fed this information to Shams to get trust in the fanbase and heat up the market for other potential head coach targets this summer.
It is more likely that the Lakers re-hire Frank Vogel than it is they end up with Nick Nurse as the head coach in 2022.