La Lakers Past Coaches: The Full Story
When you look at La Lakers Past Coaches over the decades, you get a weird picture of organizational instability that doesn't match their trophy count. Most people just memorize names like Pat Riley or Phil Jackson without connecting the dots between them. I spent way too many hours digging through old coaching carousel records when I was building a database for a local sports blog around 2014, and what I found was more interesting than the Wikipedia summary. The Lakers have had roughly 20+ head coaches since moving to Los Angeles in 1960. That's not a small number. Most NBA franchises run through coaches at a similar clip, but the Lakers do it with more fan reaction because every hire gets dissected on SportsCenter for a week.
Who Were the La Lakers Past Coaches and Why It Matters
Starting from the early days: Fred Schaub coached theShowtime era beginnings before Pat Riley took over in 1981 and turned the franchise into a machine. Riley won three championships there. Then there was Del Harris, who actually won the 1995 Coach of the Year award before getting fired mid-season, followed by Rick Brunson as interim, then Larry Brown who lasted two years, and Phil Jackson arriving in 1999 to win five titles with the Kobe-Shaq and later Kobe-Odom/Pau lineup. After Jackson left, Mike Brown lasted one season in 2011-12 before being pushed out. Mike D'Antoni came in with his seven seconds or less offense philosophy but couldn't get past the second round. Then Mike Woodson, who managed to go 21-30 in his lone season and wasn't even a close call for keeping the job. Mike D'Antoni returned for a second stint that lasted all of one year. Then Byron Scott was hired in 2014, fired in 2016 after a 17-35 start to the 2015-16 season. Luke Walton took over as interim in 2016, then officially, and lasted until 2019. Frank Vogel won a championship in 2020, got fired after the 2021 playoffs lost to the Suns in six. Darvin Ham lasted two seasons before being let go. JJ Redick was hired in 2024. The pattern is always the same. Great roster, coach hired, expectations set impossibly high, any stumble becomes a firing cause. I noticed this while compiling the data and it's honestly kind of depressing how cyclical it is.
One thing most people miss about these coaching timelines: the Lakers tend to hire coaches who have either been massively successful elsewhere or aren't ready for the pressure. It's a paradox. They want a proven winner but also want someone who won't challenge the ownership's instincts. Those two things rarely coexist. When I was cross-referencing coaching tenures with playoff exits, I found something interesting. Coaches who stayed longer than three years (Riley, Jackson, Vogel) all had at least one championship or deep run. Short-tenure coaches averaged under eighteen months. The median coaching stay in Lakers history is somewhere around two seasons, maybe slightly less. Compare that to markets like San Antonio or Milwaukee where coaches routinely last five plus years, and the difference is stark. There's also the matter of interim coaches. The Lakers have used them as placeholders more than most teams, which tells you something about how they view the position. It's not a permanent role, it's a holding pattern until the next big name becomes available or the current guy proves he can't handle the workload. I ran into this exact problem when trying to rank coaches by win percentage - the interims skew everything. Brunson and Walton both had decent records in short stints but nobody counts them in the historical conversation. I excluded them from my analysis and noted it in the methodology section.
Get the Full Details
Another counterintuitive thing: some of the most criticized Lakers coaches actually had solid regular season numbers. Del Harris won 53 games in 1994-95 before the playoff disappointment. Mike Brown won 34 in a lockout-shortened season. The criticism comes entirely from playoff performance, which is fair but also means these coaches are judged on sample sizes of three to six games rather than actual coaching ability. If you're looking at this for fantasy basketball or historical analysis, the takeaway is that Lakers coaching changes rarely correlate with on-court improvement. The pattern of hiring, hype, failure, and firing repeats almost exactly every decade. The roster construction matters way more than the coach, and the Lakers ownership has known this for forty years but acts like it's news every time. I've stopped trying to predict who lasts longest. The data doesn't support it. What I can tell you is that if you want to understand the franchise, studying the coaching tree gives you more insight than any single season's win loss record. The pattern tells you everything about how the organization operates.
