The Los Angeles Lakers somehow avoided losing any assistant coaches when they won a championship during the 2019-20 season, which is a very rare and fortunate occurrence. However, it appears their luck has run out, as Jason Kidd was recently hired to be the next head coach of the Dallas Mavericks.
Now that Kidd is gone, the Lakers will need to begin a search to find a new lead assistant. Meanwhile, Kidd will need to create an entire coaching staff from scratch with the Mavericks. Normally, when a new head coach gets hired, they’ll assemble a staff of people they trust and have worked with in the past, meaning Kidd could look to L.A. for some people.
Reportedly, that’s exactly what Kidd plans to do, although it’s unclear what specific coaches he is targeting, according to Kyle Goon of the Southern California News Group:
Cultivating a coaching staff takes time, but multiple sources who spoke to Southern California News Group on Friday said it is possible that Kidd could ask current Lakers staffers to join him in Texas to coach a team built around budding superstar Luka Doncic.
This is a very standard practice in the NBA. Plenty of coaches take staffers from their previous jobs to help fill their own staff. Hopefully, Kidd does not purge the coaching staff too much, forcing L.A. to make wholesale changes.
However, they will likely have to replace at least a few coaches, including Kidd himself. This is exactly what the Lakers were expecting to happen last season after they won the championship. They avoided it for one year, and now is the time to make changes.
Beyond that, they still need to figure out a Frank Vogel contract extension. At this point, an extension for Vogel is significantly more likely than not, but it’s still something that needs to be agreed to. That process could be slowed down by needing to hire a whole new staff.
With the roster and with the coaches, there may be a significant amount of change between last season and next season. Luckily, L.A. has some time to figure out their plans before proceeding to make decisions.
LeBron James reacts to Kidd hiring
Shortly after it was announced that Kidd would be taking over the Mavericks, Lakers star LeBron James took to Twitter to react. He congratulated Kidd for getting a head coaching job but said he was not happy to lose a valuable lead assistant. James could have some say as to who replaces Kidd on the bench.
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