Success in the NBA is a relative term.
For the Sacramento Kings, making the playoffs last season for the first time in two decades was a roaring success, propelling head coach Mike Brown to win Coach of the Year and forever connecting that group of players to the city of Sacramento and its fans.
For the Los Angeles Lakers, the expectations are a bit higher. This is the league's premier franchise, a team that has won titles in (nearly) every single decade of the league's existence. When you are hired as the head coach of the Lakers, you are expected not simply to win games, but to win championships.
Darvin Ham became the latest Lakers coach to be fired
Another head coach just learned that truth the hard way. Darvin Ham was fired as the Lakers' head coach after just two seasons. He took the Lakers to the playoffs in both seasons, including a run to the Western Conference Finals in 2022-23. It was not enough, and he fell victim to the buzzsaw of Lakers expectations.
Ham became the seventh coach to lead the Lakers since Phil Jackson, who took over the team in 2000 after winning six titles with the Chicago Bulls and proceeded to lead the Lakers to five more. Since 2011, however, the Lakers have averaged one new coach every two years.
Who has been the best Lakers head coach during that stretch? Who has been the worst? Let's rank all seven from downright "bad" to one who was consistently successful and yet became the "scapegoat" when things didn't go as well as hoped.
No. 7: Byron Scott
Byron Scott is a name well-known to Los Angeles Lakers fans as he joined the team as a rookie in 1983 and was a key member of the rotation of the Showtime Lakers, winning three titles alongside Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Michael Cooper.
In 1998 when he retired from playing basketball he began his coaching career as an assistant coach in Sacramento, and less than two years later was hired the head coaching job for the New Jersey Nets. Scott led the Nets to the NBA Finals two times, then had two disappointing tenures in New Orleans and Cleveland.
In 2014 Scott's connection to the Lakers brought him into consideration for their open head coaching position and he was hired to lead a team rebuilding in the aftermath of the failed Dwight Howard - Steve Nash additions. The Lakers won just 21 games his first season, then a franchise-worst 17 in 2015-16, which was Kobe Bryant's final season in the league.
Scott was obviously not dealt a great hand when he took over a rebuilding team, but he took a bad hand and did nothing with it. The Lakers had a lot of young talent on those teams, players that would go on to have long careers elsewhere in the league, and Scott got essentially nothing out of them.
Of all head coaches in franchise history to coach for at least two seasons, Scott had the worst winning percentage of any of them. When you're bad elsewhere, bad with the Lakers and then don't get another head coaching job, it's pretty clear you're just a genuinely bad head coach.
No. 6: Luke Walton
Continuing the theme of former Lakers players being hired as head coach, Luke Walton was brought on to run the team in 2016, replacing Byron Scott and being asked to turn the ship around after two moribund seasons.
Walton was a role player alongside Kobe Bryant for the Lakers, drafted in 2003 and playing nine seasons with the franchise, winning championships in 2009 and 2010. The son of Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, Luke never reached the heights his father did, but he did inherit something of his winsome personality and Luke built strong connections in the Lakers organization.
Fast forward 14 years, and Walton was coming off of a 73-win season as an assistant coach with the Golden State Warriors. Walton famously took over as acting head coach while Steve Kerr took a leave of absence to rehabillitate a back injury. The Warriors started 24-0 and were 39-4 when Kerr took back over. Walton's success managing the Warriors' stars made him a hot head coaching candidate, and it was his former team that hired him in 2016.
Things did not go well for Walton with the Lakers. Still rebuilding the roster after the retirement of Kobe Bryant, the Lakers won just 26 games in his first season, then 35 the following year. His third season was marked by the addition of LeBron James in free agency, but between LeBron missing time due to injury and the lack of a contending roster around him, Walton oversaw the first LeBron team to miss the playoffs in over a decade. He and the team "mutually parted ways" after the 2018-19 season.
Walton had a lot of things working against him as the head coach of the Lakers, from a front office marked by in-fighting to a roster divided between raw youth and washed veterans. If he had gone from the Lakers to his next stop, the Sacramento Kings, and found success his tenure with the Lakers would be looked at differently. Since he was a disaster in Sacramento as well, it looks like he was at least a large part of the problem in Los Angeles.
In three seasons, Walton went 98-148, just a .398 winning percentage, and missed the playoffs all three times.
No. 5: Bernie Bickerstaff
In 2012 Lakers head coach Mike Brown hired longtime head coach Bernie Bickerstaff as an assistant coach. Bickerstaff, the father of current Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, entered the NBA coaching ranks in 1973 and was the head coach for four different franchises over 14 seasons before he was hired by the Lakers.
Bickerstaff's tenure as an assistant coach with the Lakers under Brown did not last long, as Brown was fired just five games into the 2012-13 season after going 1-4. Bernie was then handed the reigns as an interim coach as the Lakers negotiated with Mike D'Antoni. After D'Antoni was hired as head coach, his start with the team was delayed by a few days as he recovered from surgery.
Bickerstaff stood in the gap, coaching just five games for the team. To his credit, he went 4-1 in that span, helping to right the ship for the Lakers and hand a .500 team off to D'Antoni. He stayed on with the team for the season but was let go after that.
Going 4-1 gave Bickerstaff an .800 winning percentage that technically makes him the all-time winningest coach in Lakers history. Pat Riley had a .733 winning percentage, Jack McKinney a .714, Paul Westhead a .689. He was genuinely liked by the Lakers players, but as they looked to win another title they quickly replaced him with Mike D'Antoni and he moved on to another stop.
No. 4: Mike D'Antoni
Few head coaches in the history of the Los Angeles Lakers were hired with such a pedigree and track record as Mike D'Antoni. Phil Jackson, of course, joined the team after winning six championships, but most notable head coaches in Lakers history made their name first with the Lakers, with Pat Riley being a notable example.
Mike D'Antoni was the architect of the "Seven Seconds or Less" offense with the Phoenix Suns, which maximized changing league rules and a superstar floor general in Steve Nash to field elite offenses that changed NBA offense forever.
What D'Antoni didn't have upon joining the Lakers was playoff success, going 26-25 with the Suns and 0-4 with the New York Knicks in between. Unfortunately, he wouldn't gain it with the Lakers either, as he was unable to take a feuding, aging and ill-fitting collection of star players and make them sing.
Kobe Bryant, Nash, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard looked like an amazing collection of talent on paper, but in reality they struggled with injuries and chemistry and D'Antoni wasn't able to find the breakthrough to bring them together. The Lakers went 40-32 his first season and then were demolished by the Dallas Mavericks in the playoffs four games to none. They stumbled to a 27-55 year the following season and D'Antoni was fired.
Nash played a total of 65 games combined across those two seasons; Kobe missed all but 6 games of that second season. D'Antoni was handed a grenade, it went off in his hands, and he was blamed for it. Still, he didn't do anything to earn himself a more prominent standing on this list, and it's an indictment of the other Lakers coaches during this period that there were three ranked worse than he was.
No. 3: Mike Brown
In 2011, former Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Mike Brown was hired to succeed Phil Jackson as head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. It's always a difficult task to succeed a legend, but Brown was accomplished, well-liked around the league and seemed like a great choice at the time.
His first season, the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, was a solid one. The Lakers went 41-25 (equivalent to 51 wins in a full season), won their division and made it to the second round before losing to the Oklahoma City Thunder, who would go on to reach the NBA Finals. There was some friction between Brown and the team's veterans, led by Kobe Bryant, largely centering around the differences between Brown's Princeton offense and Phil Jackson's old Triangle offense. Those kinds of growing pains are expected when replacing an icon like Jackson, and they were more details to note than red flags.
That following offseason is what doomed Brown as the Lakers' coach. The Lakers made a couple of significant trades to land center Dwight Howard and point guard Steve Nash. On paper, pairing those two future Hall of Famers with Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol should have formed a super team, and the foursome was plastered on the covers of sports magazines.
The reality was something much different and much worse. The Lakers got out to a slow start, going 1-4 to open the year, and the Lakers' front office panicked. They fired Brown just five games into the season, hiring Mike D'Antoni to replace him as head coach.
The reality of the situation came to light in the coming months; that group simply did not have it. Kobe Bryant was unwilling to come to grips with his aging body and eroding game, Dwight Howard was unwilling to share any spotlights, and Steve Nash was a shell of himself. Sprinkle in Pau Gasol (gamely) playing out of position to accommodate Howard and you got a "Super Team" that never got off the ground.
Brown only got five games to prove something, but the rest of the year proved he wouldn't have had a shot anyway. After a long tenure with the Golden State Warriors as an assistant, Brown is now the head coach of the Sacramento Kings and won Coach of the Year for leading them back to the playoffs.
No. 2: Darvin Ham
It is both an indictment of the rest of the head coaches on this list and a vote of support for the coach the Lakers just fired that Darvin Ham appears at No. 2 on this list.
A longtime assistant coach under Mike Budenholzer, Darvin Ham got his first head coaching opportunity with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2022, when he was hired to replace Frank Vogel. Ham had a level of toughness and honesty to him that appealed to Lakers management, and his history as an NBA player was expected to help him connect with the Lakers' veterans.
Ham was then handed a roster that contained LeBron James and Anthony Davis, two cornerstone players to build on...and otherwise, a roster that was ill-fitting and underperforming, with Russell Westbrook as the poster child. Ham, to his credit, got the team pulling in the same direction and Westbrook to agree to a bench role.
When the Lakers then traded Westbrook at the Tradde Deadline and got back a number of players, Ham was able to take a better-fitting and improved roster and get to work. The Lakers played well to end the season, then won two series to reach the Western Conference Finals.
His second season was a more difficult one, as the Lakers lost that sense of pulling in the same direction and weren't able to build on the late-season success of the year before. They snuck into the playoffs as the seventh seed and lost in five games to the Denver Nuggets, costing Ham his job.
Did Ham's tough-guy message get stale after just one season? The Budenholzer disciple surprisingly struggled to craft lineups that would excel and was constantly changing those lineups and the rotation as a whole, something that didn't endear him to his veterans. At the same time, the reason he kept shuffling the lineups was that the players he had to work with didn't fit together extremely well.
Darvin Ham was a better coach than his two-year firing would suggest, and it's possible that his replacement is even worse than he was and the Lakers regret firing him. He also didn't do anything to excel and with a Lakers franchise that always has the highest of expectations that was enough to see him out the door.
No. 1: Frank Vogel
The Los Angeles Lakers wanted a head coach who had a proven track record of success and knew how to craft an elite defense. They knew they had a window to try and win the title with LeBron James on the team, and they chose Frank Vogel to head up the operation.
The front office also hired former head coach Jason Kidd as Vogel's lead assistant, making it clear from the start that if Vogel couldn't deliver success right away there was a ready-made replacement waiting for the opportunity.
Vogel didn't give Kidd or the front office a chance, leading the Lakers to the title in his first season. They went 52-19 for the year, a 60-win pace, and they had the league's third-best defense. That became the best defense in the playoffs as they smothered opponents once the season restarted in the Orlando Bubble and won the franchise's first title since 2010.
Things fell apart from there, but it's difficult to understand why Vogel was to blame. The following season the team was wracked by injuries, with LeBron James playing just 45 games and Anthony Davis 36. They still made it into the playoffs before losing in six to the Phoenix Suns.
That next offseason LeBron James encouraged the front office to trade away good, proven role players for Russell Westbrook, one of the most disastrous trades in modern NBA history. It destroyed the Lakers' chances of contending for a title, and Vogel unsurprisingly wasn't able to make things work with a roster that was stripped of all the parts that once made it work. The Lakers won just 33 games and Vogel was fired after just three seasons despite winning a title.
Frank Vogel isn't a top-5 coach in the NBA, but if he is given a good roster he can shape it into something great. His defensive coaching in particular is top notch, and he proved in 202 that he can lead the right roster to a title. The Lakers then came down hard on him for not taking a bad roster and making it great, and it's hard to pin that on Vogel. He was a scapegoat for the disappointment the organization experienced and, in some ways, for Rob Pelinka going through with the Russell Westbrook trade.
Without question, Frank Vogel was the best head coach the Lakers have had since the departure of Phil Jackson.