It was a packed crowd in the American Airlines Center on Feb 26. While a time-out gave a breather to the end-to-end action, one voice pierced through the courtside mics. “Listen, I got it, I got it. Hey, give me the board. I got it,” shouts were heard from the Lakers dugout, but footage showed it was not Darvin Ham rallying the troops. It was LeBron James who hollered at his teammates, taking up Ham’s job to coach the side. That moment was enough to paint the picture of the HC losing his grip over the locker room.

Fast-forward to August, the Lakers already have a new man in the hot seat with JJ Redick. After the sacking of Darvin Ham, a glaring question popped up – where exactly did it go wrong for the 51-year-old? This question was answered during the latest episode of the Lakers Nation podcast and a key reason came up explaining Darvin Ham’s downfall.

According to Donnie Ballard, Ham’s use of Jarred Vanderbilt caused all sorts of malfunctions in the group. Vando only played 29 regular season games due to his injury issues. However, when he played, the forward looked like a solution to their backcourt issue. “Man, they could have been I just feel like this looking at stuff like this really just shines a spotlight on Darvin last year. There’s a lot of instances like this too where he just didn’t use the right lineups, where even if you look at it analytically, you can see the best pairings, and he just wasn’t using them,” Ballard said.

Vando in the starting five alongside LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Austin Reaves and D’Angelo Russell only played 68 possessions last season while being +39.6. But Ham didn’t utilize this underlying number to his advantage. “This was the part of the season, I think, when Darvin kinda lost the locker room was when he wasn’t playing the lineups that the whole point of last season’s team was to keep the chemistry together,” Trevor Lane added. He also gave a heads-up to JJ Redick on how to avoid this situation by utilizing Vando despite him being below Rui Hachimura in the pecking order.

JJ Redick’s Lakers plan emerges, showing striking contrast from Darvin Ham’s board work

“Shoot, shoot and shoot some more” – was the message from JJ Redick after his Lakers hiring. The former Magic guard even ran an open heart surgery during his introductory presser on the Lakers’ shooting woe last season. The gold and purple were 22nd in 3-pts shooting per game in 2023/24 and much of the scoring burden fell on LeBron and AD. To rid LeBron of the pressure, JJ announces how he’ll utilize AD in the way the Nuggets use Nikola Jokic or the Kings use Domantas Sabonis.

With Dalton Knecht’s inclusion, he can be an option available to Redick to boost the shooting department, with Vando more as a defensive piece on the board to support AD. Davis’ shooting needs improvement in that regard for him to work similarly to the league’s MVP, something JJ needs to fix on priority. But to work as a cohesive unit, team selection becomes imperative for JJ Redick. More so, there’s another major aspect the young HC needs to make sure of that LeBron doesn’t take the board away from him, cause we already know how things will go after that with the burning example of Darvin Ham.