How Byron Scott Made the Lakers Even Worse

With just five games left in a totally lost season, Los Angeles Lakers coach Byron Scott decided to call out his team. This is what NBA Insiders call A Serious Dick Move, and a desperate one, but it's also strikingly, damningly in character for the NBA's most repellent coach. Even when he's not rolling his deliberately and brutally undermanned team under a bus, Scott spent much of this season making a public spectacle of how honor-bound he is to a brand of basketball that, without fail, undermines whatever minimal chance those players ever had of playing competent basketball. This is just what he does, and who he is. Head Coach Byron Scott is a pair of cement shoes belittling the drowning wearer's inability to swim.

Scott announced this to the world before the season even started when he noted that he would arbitrarily limit his team's three-point attempts, even as the whole rest of the basketball world is benefiting from the keen observation that 3 > 2. He used that same occasion to applaud his team's defensive aggression—aggression that led to 37 fouls in an exhibition game, an outrageous number. This is how Scott wanted his team to play, because certainly there can be nothing at all faulty about a strategy that grants the opponent an abundance of free throws on nothing but principle.

It's worth noting that Byron Scott is not new to any of this. He had a long and successful NBA career in which, among other things, he took (and made) a great many three-point shots; he has been an NBA coach for parts of 14 seasons, the first of which came just three years after his last game as a player. He has every reason to know that basketball played on pure willfulness and principle does not and will not work. He has chosen not to know it.

This experiment in retrograde basketball has worked about as well as anyone not named Byron Scott would expect: the Lakers are near the bottom of the league in shot attempts both at the rim and from beyond the arc, the two most efficient and effective places to attempt a shot. They're at or near the top in attempts from every midrange area, and their already miserable defense yields the third most free throw attempts per game. Maybe this pattern of futility, and all the associated losing, changed Scott's receptivity to math? Apparently not: "I think we've got a few guys who believe in it," he said when asked about contemporary stats. "I'm not one of them."

Not all of the Lakers' hilarious ineptitude comes down to Scott's preferences, to be fair. This is not a competitive NBA roster, even (and maybe especially) with Kobe Bryant in good health. But the greater part of what's beyond Scott's control—the depleted, punchless, nigh-hopeless roster of mismatched and underqualified players the Lakers front office assembled—is exactly what makes his regular, public big-timing of their effort so spectacularly shitty.

The Lakers have a nightmarish roster. Hamstrung by some combination of Kobe's terrible contract, Kobe's terrible leg injuries, Kobe's terrible aging, and Kobe's terrible reputation and behavior as a teammate, the Lakers haven't been able to surround the mummified remains of their best player with more than an anemic handful of legitimate rotation-grade NBA players. That meager talent has been largely cancelled out by injuries and Carlos Boozer. What's left is a group that rivals the Sixers and late-season Knicks for sheer quantity of oh-right-I-forgot-that-dude-was-still-alive players on an active NBA roster.

It's hard to know whether this collection of marginal dudes are trying their hardest on a nightly basis, but easy to guess that it wouldn't mater much. There is no set of circumstances in which this Lakers roster could sniff the playoffs, short of asteroids simultaneously hitting the practice courts of literally every other team in the conference. Further, the Lakers have a strong perverse incentive to tank towards the bottom of the league; their upcoming first-round draft pick will go to Philadelphia if it falls outside the top five.

Byron Scott, as willfully thick-skulled and intractable as he is with regard to modern basketball, is certainly in the loop about the long-term interests of the Lakers organization, and the pointlessness and undesirability of accruing wins in a lost season. His reason for calling out his players—and to the media, no less—therefore has absolutely nothing to do with motivating them to play winning basketball. It doesn't seem to have much to do with motivating them to play harder, either—this roster is success-proof, by design.

No, Byron Scott's reason for publicly emasculating his players, who are confronted daily with the humiliation of being hopelessly outgunned while wearing their sport's most prominent uniform and playing for a coach who won't let them try their hand at efficient basketball, is to distance himself and his bullshit reputation from the tire fire he's paid to tend. It matters to him that strangers out there know he's a tougher dude than the guys around him, and he will point it out to make sure everyone knows it.

In Byron Scott's world, where an aesthetic preference for a backwards-ass brand of basketball is reason enough to deny mathematics, any opportunity not spent making a public display of his big manly chest is an opportunity wasted.

The NBA apparently still has room for this kind of buffoon, for better or worse. Not coincidentally, that space is reserved at the helm of sinking ships. For a team that was aiming for that sort of season all along, no one could be better suited for the job than Byron Scott. He should be grateful there are NBA teams invested in losing. His insistence on taking his players down with him is distasteful, but it's part of his job. The Lakers hired him to lose, and in this way—if only in this way—Byron Scott has delivered.