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Frank Vogel fired: Lakers part ways with head coach after three seasons; GM Rob Pelinka addresses decision

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Frank Vogel has coached his final game for the Los Angeles Lakers. Vogel was fired by the Lakers on Monday, the team announced. The Lakers, winners of the 2020 NBA championship under Vogel, entered the season as Western Conference favorites. They failed to live up to that mantle due to a combination of injuries, age, a poorly-built roster and mismanagement of that roster, and last Tuesday, they were officially eliminated from playoff contention. They closed the season with a 33-49 record. Now Vogel is paying the price for their failure and has been removed from his position as coach less than two years after leading the Lakers to the title.

“Today is not going to be a day of finger-pointing and unwinding all the specific reasons,” Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka said of the decision to move on from Vogel on Monday. “We just felt organizationally, at the highest level, it was time for a new voice. … That’s not to say anything against the incredible accomplishments that Frank Vogel has had. He was a great coach here, and he’s going to go on to be a great coach somewhere else.

“This was a disappointing Lakers season at every level,” Pelinka added. “In the face of disappointment, our fans expect more, and that’s in every facet. It starts in the front office led by me, and our ability to construct the right roster. It starts with the coaches holding players accountable and making sure there’s on-court execution.”  

In truth, the Lakers were hardly committed to Vogel even when they hired him. They had initially planned to hire Ty Lue, but when they offered him only a three-year deal and demanded control over his coaching staff, he declined the offer and the Lakers turned to Vogel. He accepted the shorter contract and it paid off for all parties involved. Yet even after Vogel won a championship, he still needed to wait until after the 2020-21 season to earn a contract extension. That extension reportedly added only a single year to his deal, contracting him for only a total of four despite Lue getting a five-year deal from the Clippers before ever coaching a game for them.

Vogel’s strength as a coach has always been his defensive acumen. The Lakers won the 2020 championship based on their defense, and last season, they ranked No. 1 in the league despite injuries to both LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Not even Vogel could save this season’s Lakers roster, though, as they fell to No. 21 in defense. Couple that decline with Vogel’s often baffling rotation decisions and the Lakers have decided to move on from their embattled coach.

Vogel should now become one of the most pursued coaches on the market. In three NBA stops he has won a championship, reached the conference finals three times and won just under 53 percent of his regular-season games. Should he fail to earn another head-coaching job this offseason, he could either take a year off (as he did after being fired by the Orlando Magic in 2018) or pursue an assistant coaching position. Vogel was a rumored candidate for Lue’s staff had Lue been hired by the Lakers in 2019.

The Lakers, meanwhile, will now search for their sixth full-time head coach since Phil Jackson retired in 2011. None of the others have been nearly as successful as Vogel was. Traditionally, teams almost never fire coaches so soon after a championship. But the Lakers are not a traditional organization. They demand excellence year in, year out. They’ve made it clear that any coach that can’t live up to that standard will be out of a job. Now, they’ve moved on from the only coach aside from Jackson to lead them to a championship in the past three decades.

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Lakers want Russell Westbrook demoted to bench but so far Frank Vogel has resisted, per report

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USATSI

The Los Angeles Lakers are desperate for any kind of spark. Yes, they got a win over the Warriors on Saturday, thanks to a season-high 56 points from LeBron James, but prior to that they’d lost four straight and 11 of their last 14. 

Short of LeBron working a nightly miracle, might moving Russell Westbrook to the bench be their last card to play? 

According to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, there is an “increasing push” from the Lakers’ higher-ups to demote Westbrook from the starting lineup, “but so far coach Frank Vogel has resisted” making that move. Westbrook started Saturday night vs. the Warriors and finished with 20 points on 9-of-17 shooting. 

Vogel has flirted with this idea of moving Westbrook to the bench, and he has held him out of closing stretches of games on a few occasions this season. He’s just not suited to play off the ball. He’s shooting 28 percent from 3. 

Westbrook isn’t the Lakers’ only problem. But he’s at the core of what ails them. He cost them a lot of depth, shooting and perimeter defense to acquire. The Lakers, reportedly at the behest of LeBron James and Anthony Davis, squashed a potential Buddy Hield trade to bring in Westbrook instead. 

They went all-in on a player who just isn’t very good anymore. Moving Westbrook to the bench isn’t going to make him a better fit; it would simply be about subtracting him from the first unit. The question would then become: Will he close games? If a player isn’t in the starting lineup, there’s definitely no assumption that he’ll close. 

Westbrook has made it clear he sees himself as a starter and a closer, and he would not be OK with being demoted. Vogel is in a sticky situation. Yanking a former superstar from the starting lineup is a touchy deal. Per Wojnarowski, there have been “some tense moments between Vogel and Westbrook in the past several days, including during a Friday team film session.”

We’ll see if Vogel eventually pulls the trigger on this move. There’s not much of the season left, and the Lakers are running out of time to figure something out. 

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Frank Vogel rumors: Lakers coach was authorized to bench Russell Westbrook, won’t be fired on Friday

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The Los Angeles Lakers trailed the Indiana Pacers by only a single point when Russell Westbrook re-entered Wednesday’s game with 8:15 remaining in the fourth quarter. With under four minutes to go, their deficit had ballooned up to seven. This was hardly a surprise. 

The Lakers have been outscored by 34 points in Westbrook’s 342 fourth-quarter minutes this season. In the 198 fourth-quarter minutes they’ve played without him, they’ve outscored their opponents by 50 points. With yet another opportunity squandered on Westbrook’s watch, Vogel had seen enough. He pulled Westbrook out of the game at the 3:52 mark and never reinserted him. After the game, he was brutally honest about his decision. 

“Playing the guys that I thought were going to win the game,” Vogel explained when asked about Westbrook’s benching. It is a move that Lakers fans have clamored for all season, but one that will surely have enormous repercussions in the locker room. Westbrook is not only a former MVP, but one that LeBron James lobbied the team to acquire personally. 

But according to ESPN’s Dave McMenamin, Vogel was given the green light to bench Westbrook by the front office, whose approach over the past week and a half has been to allow Vogel to handle Westbrook as he saw fit. McMenamin noted that Westbrook failed to defend Pacers guard Caris LeVert as the game-plan emphasized that he should, which likely played a part in Westbrook getting benched.

Vogel himself is in an extremely precarious position. Reports have suggested that Vogel is currently coaching for his job, and that he was almost fired after the Lakers were dealt a 37-point loss to the Denver Nuggets on Saturday. Vogel will not be fired for the time being and will travel to Orlando to coach against the Magic on Friday, according to Yahoo’s Chris Haynes.

Vogel used six players after removing Westbrook: James, Carmelo Anthony, Austin Reaves, Talen Horton-Tucker, Avery Bradley and Malik Monk. Four of those players, like Westbrook, are guards. Another significant guard, Kendrick Nunn, is slated for a major role when he returns from the injury that has held him out all season. It is therefore worth asking what exactly Westbrook’s role will be moving forward if Vogel is finally willing to allocate his minutes based on performance over reputation. Might Westbrook be forced to come off of the bench rather than start? The Lakers could try to trade Westbrook before the Feb. 10 deadline, but according to Bleacher Report’s Eric Pincus, the market for him is “nonexistent.”

For now, that means that all the Lakers can do is hold Westbrook accountable for his play. He is shooting 30.2 percent from the field in his last seven games. He’s been a defensive liability all season and the Lakers have played better with him on the bench by virtually every statistical marker. That is not the sort of player that deserves to close games, and if Wednesday was any indication, that’s a role Westbrook will have to earn back if it’s one he wants to have at all.

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Los Angeles Lakers coach Frank Vogel addresses job security

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LOS ANGELES — Just 15 months removed from guiding the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA championship, coach Frank Vogel once again found himself answering questions about his job security on Wednesday night.

“I don’t feel like I’m under siege,” Vogel said before the Lakers hosted the Indiana Pacers. “It’s not hard to do my job, I’m very focused on the task at hand. I’ve always been that way.”

Following a 37-point loss to the Denver Nuggets over the weekend — which was L.A.’s third straight loss at the time, with the Lakers’ defense allowing 125 points or more in all three defeats — Vogel’s job was in jeopardy, according to various reports.

Had L.A. suffered a similar result in Monday’s game against the Utah Jazz, the Lakers’ front office could have felt compelled to remove Vogel from his post, sources told ESPN.

Instead, the Lakers beat the Jazz 101-95 in the team’s most complete performance of the season. The Lakers held the league’s No. 1 offense to just 37.3% shooting and downed the No. 4 team in the Western Conference despite missing All-Star big man Anthony Davis (knee) and leading bench scorer Carmelo Anthony (back).

Vogel was able to press on, but he was asked Wednesday about the tenuous time as he prepared to coach a Pacers team that came into the night having lost 10 of its previous 11.

“It’s really not up to me whether it’s fair or not,” he said. “It comes with the territory, comes with being the Lakers coach. We have high expectations. This fan base really cares. It’s a big market, and I wouldn’t want it any other way, to be honest with you. I want people to care, I want people to want the best and to command excellence out of our group, that’s what we command of ourselves, that’s just the way it is.”

It was the second time this season that Vogel addressed questions about his job performance — a line of questioning that was almost invited by the Lakers after granting Vogel only a one-year contract extension in the offseason. The tepid financial commitment came despite the fact that Vogel’s playoff coaching record winning percentage, 18-9 (.667), puts him third in franchise history behind only Pat Riley (.685) and Paul Westhead (.684), and ahead of Phil Jackson (.652), who is fourth.

Vogel said Wednesday his interactions with the Lakers’ front office — namely vice president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka as well as senior basketball adviser Kurt Rambis — have been business as usual, even with L.A.’s recent struggles.

“I meet with our front office,” Vogel said. “We talk about the previous night’s game. Every game. All year. It’s been that way for three years. And it’s not been different this week or of late.”

Vogel characterized his relationship with the front office as “healthy” and said he’s been given no specific feedback about his job performance as L.A. has started the season at an underwhelming 22-22 (.500).

“Everyone is working together to leave no stone unturned in terms of getting this thing going in the right direction,” he said. “And we all have a great working relationship where we’re trying to figure out things together. We won a championship this way, and I feel good about our process.”

Vogel said the scrutiny is part and parcel to manning the sidelines for a team stocked with future Hall of Famers and expecting another title run.

“In this business, and with this team, if you’re not winning at a super high level, you’re going to get this type of noise,” he said. “I’m good at blocking that out. I feel good about the job that we’re doing.”

Vogel said the Lakers’ defensive execution against the Jazz should be a lesson to his team on what it can accomplish when it brings the requisite focus to a game. He said that he and his coaching staff will continue to tweak its schematic concepts and lineups on a game-to-game basis until Davis returns.

“I believe in what we can do this year,” he said. “So steadfastly remaining focused on the task at hand.”

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Lakers nearly fired Frank Vogel after blowout loss as embattled coach remains on hot seat, per report

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Frank Vogel has been on the hot seat throughout a disappointing 2021-22 season for the Los Angeles Lakers, but things have only gotten harder recently. According to The Athletic’s Bill Oram and Sam Amick, Vogel is being evaluated on a game-to-game basis. They report that he “narrowly avoided” being fired after the Lakers were demolished 133-96 by the Denver Nuggets on Saturday, and had the Lakers lost in similar fashion to the Utah Jazz on Monday, sources believed it could have been Vogel’s last game with the Lakers.

Despite the Lakers pulling off a 10-point second-half comeback, Vogel is very much still coaching for his job, according to The Athletic. The Lakers are a disappointing 22-22 through 44 games, and Vogel’s formerly top-ranked defense has fallen to No. 18 this season due to a combination of injuries and roster turnover. For a team with championship ambitions, those results simply aren’t acceptable.

But Vogel’s job security has been tenuous since before the season even began. When he was initially hired as coach of the Lakers in 2019 he was given only a three-year contract, unusually short for any coach, much less one as accomplished as he was when he got the Laker job. Despite winning the championship in 2020, he was given only a one-year contract extension in the 2021 offseason, suggesting that the team wanted to maintain flexibility should their roster overhaul fail to produce another title.

Sources told The Athletic that former Lakers forward and current executive Kurt Rambis, an influential voice in the organization even without holding the title or powers of a general manager, made it clear to the staff early in the season that their jobs were not safe. Former team president Magic Johnson also voiced his displeasure publicly after the Denver loss with a scathing tweet that read “After being blown out by the Nuggets 133-96, we as Lakers fans can accept being outplayed but we deserve more than a lack of effort and no sense of urgency. Owner Jeanie Buss, you deserve better.” While Johnson no longer technically works in the Lakers front office, he has a decades-long friendship with Buss and was extremely close with her father, the late Jerry Buss.

Vogel has a chance to boost his stock a bit over the next two games because, ironically, he will be coaching against his two former employers. The Lakers will host the Indiana Pacers on Tuesday before starting a five-game road trip against the Orlando Magic on Friday. Those two games are winnable, but afterward, the Lakers have difficult road games against the Heat, Nets and 76ers. Their schedule as a whole in the second half of the season is the hardest remaining in the league. If Vogel needs to win to keep his job, he’ll have his work cut out for him.

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Frank Vogel says Lakers are ‘excited’ to have Stanley Johnson back

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The Lakers made a widely expected move official on Thursday, bringing back Stanley Johnson for his first of two allowable non-hardship 10-day contracts. The move meant that Johnson was able to participate in the team’s 12th practice of the season, and head coach Frank Vogel was happy about his return after missing a game against the Sacramento Kings while the team waited to legally be able to sign normal 10-day deals.

“We’re excited to have him back obviously. He played well under the hardship contract for us, and just provided an element of defense, toughness and athleticism that we’ve been lacking,” Vogel said.

But while Johnson started in three of the five games he appeared in for the Lakers while filling in as a hardship player, Vogel said that no one should count on that happening again when the Lakers host the Atlanta Hawks on Friday.

“We’re excited to have him back, but obviously not going to commit to any lineups or anything like that,” Vogel said.

As my co-host Anthony Irwin and I joked in our podcast reacting to Johnson’s return, Frank is likely just being Frank in his lack of frankness here. This man guards his starting lineups with more verve than a world leader securing their nuclear codes, so he was never likely to tip his hand about who would be starting for the team in a game more than 24 hours away.

Still, there are reasons to expect that Johnson may slide back into the starting unit at some point, even if it’s not against the Hawks. For one thing, the Lakers only have 10-20 days to evaluate if the positives Johnson showed while on his first hardship deal can continue as he gets more time alongside his new Lakers teammates, and the best way to get him those minutes to evaluate is by using him in the lineup that plays the most (the starters).

Additionally, as my colleague Mike Trudell pointed out on Tuesday, we have quite a bit of evidence that Vogel likes himself some Stanimal, as the starting lineup featuring the 25-year-old on a 10-day hardship deal has already played the FIFTH-MOST MINUTES of any Lakers unit.

As Vogel pointed out, that is in part due to injuries and illness, but is still evidence that Vogel seemed to like what he was seeing from that group with Johnson in it quite a bit.

So will he go back to it against Atlanta? Who knows. The Hawks — as our own Nicole Ganglani pointed out in her in-depth game preview — are a large team in the frontcourt. This could be a game where the Lakers decide to start Dwight Howard to save LeBron James from having to guard Clint Capela, or they could turn to Trevor Ariza in Johnson’s place to get a bit more rebounding on the floor.

But even if Vogel is playing coy about how Johnson will be used, the evidence points to him being just as “excited” as he says about Johnson’s return to the team. So starter or not, expect Johnson to play a significant role as the Lakers try to use the next few weeks to decide whether or not to sign him for the rest of the season.

For more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts. You can follow Harrison on Twitter at @hmfaigen.



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