The Lakers are going to run out of options before they find a coach dumb enough to welcome Kurt Rambis to their staff.
Earlier on Thursday, reports surfaced that before he was let go, one of the hangups between Los Angeles Lakers management and Luke Walton was the insistence that he add Kurt Rambis to his coaching staff.
Walton instead chose to live in Sacramento. The Lakers didn’t get the hint.
According to Vincent Goodwill of Yahoo Sports, Rambis was once again a point of contention, this time with Tyronn Lue, who chose to remain unemployed rather than employ the former Lakers and Knicks assistant coach:
And what’s worse, asking Lue to take on Rambis as an assistant, a no-no according to sources close to Lue, feels like the Lakers want their walls bugged and feared a LeBron takeover — as if Lue would allow himself to be used as a puppet.
It’s really starting to sound like Rambis is perfectly okay with (if not outright pushing for) his wife, Linda -- a close confidant of Lakers owner Jeanie Buss -- doing whatever it takes to get him another job, seeing as no other team in their right mind would hire him at this point.
At some point, have some pride, Kurt. This is beyond shameful.
It’s also worth wondering whether the Lakers are just going to race through their entire list of potential candidates until they find someone desperate enough to welcome Rambis — or Jason Kidd — to their staff. Whenever that person does come along, the chances that they are actually a decent hire are not great, either, by the way.
All this once again begs the question: What the actual hell is going on here?
Jeanie Buss is presumably somehow okay with all this, seeing as it’s continuing under her watch and, as I wrote earlier Thursday, there are no adults around to put a stop to all this nonsense. Linda Rambis has no incentive to stop this ridiculous cycle if it might result in her significant other landing a gig he almost definitely doesn’t deserve.
And that is the central point to make here and might start to provide some clarity as to who might be behind all the current stupidity.
Ask yourself this: Who stands to benefit from the ladder born of all this chaos? It’s pretty obviously the Rambii, right? The longer this continues, the larger that power vacuum might become and thus the more power they can assume. It’s already beyond insane that they may have any actual veto power right now, as Nick Wright reported Wednesday, but we’re in the Twilight Zone already. This is apparently just how things are going.
While you might be sitting there at home, fuming at the Rambii daring to assume all this power, the blame still resides solely with the person who allowed the situation to get to this place at all. Buss might not want to stand up to her best friend of as many as 40 years, but that’s exactly what this situation calls for.
If the Rambii are legitimately affecting the way the Lakers are being run and the decision that are and are not made, then at some point, Buss is going to have to stand up for the organization she claims to care so deeply about. Until she does, all those quotes about living up to her father’s legacy ring completely hollow.
One of the people involved here has to stand up and show some pride. Rambis shamelessly asking anyone who comes into the facility to hire him as part of the interview process is just gross, especially when he’s seemingly leveraging his wife’s friendship to her boss in order to make that happen.
The people actually tasked with holding these interviews have to show some pride themselves, too, though Rob Pelinka (who benefitted in his own way from a similar leadership void thanks to Magic Johnson’s poor work ethic) is unlikely to get in the way of the Rambis’ hustle. As has been the case since she completed her coup and sent Jim Buss back to the horse races, the onus falls to Jeanie, and the longer she waits, the more fans will wish Jim had never left.
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