Byron Scott's Championship Talk a Double-Edged Sword for Los Angeles Lakers

Hubris isn’t exactly a scarce commodity in the world of professional sports. If anything, it’s a prerequisite for any championship-caliber psyche—the mental pillar on which the world’s best athletes and coaches will inevitably lean in times both boom and bust.

But there’s a feather-fine line between hubris and confidence on the one hand and bombastic bluster on the other.

Judging by some of his most recent remarks, Los Angeles Lakers head coach Byron Scott isn’t too worried about breaching that threshold.

“I’m going to walk into our locker room the first day of our meeting and say, ‘I want to win a championship,’” Scott told the Los Angeles Daily News’ Mark Medina in a recent interview. “I don’t want us thinking it’s fine if we just make the playoffs or think we have no shot at making the playoffs. I don’t believe that. I want our guys to have the same mindset as I do.”

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On the one hand, Scott’s remarks speak to a common crux of Coaching 101: the idea that if you aren’t striving for the game’s highest heights, you needn’t bother climbing at all. Indeed, anything less not only risks compromising the confidence of your team; it puts you at odds with fans whose very countenance is rooted in unrealistic expectations. Delusion, for lack of a better word, is what backs your paycheck.

On the other hand, the Lakers are coming off their worst season in almost 60 years, play in a perpetually loaded Western Conference and are poised to pay their best player—the 36-year-old Kobe Bryant—a whopping $48.5 million over the next two years, despite recent injuries to the aging star’s Achilles and knee.

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Meanwhile, L.A.’s second-best player, Carlos Boozer, was grabbed off waivers after being released by the Chicago Bulls via the NBA’s amnesty provision.

If this doesn’t sound like the blueprint for a championship-caliber team, congratulations: You are firmly grounded in this dimension.

Quips aside, it’s impossible not to read into Scott’s comments a somewhat cynical ploy to please the notoriously competitive Bryant, who recently offered up some similarly lofty language of his own.

Scott understands his best chance of surviving his team’s ongoing purgatory lies in allying himself as closely as possible with L.A.’s longtime cornerstone. That way, if Jim Buss decides to prematurely sever ties with Scott, he’ll inevitably be putting himself on a collision course with Bryant as well.

Then again, it’s not as if Kobe has been quick to fall on his sword on his coach’s behalf. Just ask Mike Brown and Mike D’Antoni, both of whom were given the axe without so much as a peep of protest from Bryant’s camp.

More likely, Scott’s grandiose statement is designed to serve as a clarion call for a legacy franchise lately fallen on hard times. Indeed, if the Lakers have any designs on making a splash in the next two free-agent classes, appealing to L.A.’s much-heralded history isn’t merely a sound PR strategy; it’s a necessary one.

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Not that the Lakers have ever had a hard time selling themselves to prospective saviors. But with three mixed-bag stints as a coach behind him, Scott knows L.A. represents perhaps his last, best chance of capturing an ever-elusive NBA championship.

That is why, as Bleacher Report’s Michael Pina recently underscored, Scott is looking to distance himself as much as possible from the newfangled philosophies of the team’s previous coach, Mike D’Antoni:

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Scott is bringing a traditionalist approach back to Lakers basketball, and after a season with the most losses in the team’s franchise history, it’s time to refocus on the basics.

This doesn’t mean the game won’t still be fun. Nick “Swaggy P” Young will continue to celebrate after baskets made and Bryant—despite being older and perhaps slower—will still put on signature displays of basketball brilliance. Jeremy Lin will attempt to create some new history, three years after his apex with the Knicks, and rookie Julius Randle will bull his way to the basket and score his first points in the NBA.

And if Scott has his way, the points scored will come after stops made rather than the notion of simply trying to sink more shots than the other guys.

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How Scott intends to implement a defense-first mentality on a team with precisely zero reliable defenders is another question entirely.

Still, the Lakers were clearly a machine in need of a shock to the system, and Scott—a “Showtime” legend since recast as a paragon of more basic basketball principles—provides that in spades.

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In fact, his strategic approach is so diametrically opposed to that of D’Antoni that, by the time the regular season rolls around, Scott’s flights of linguistic fancy will scarce be remembered by the public.

The players—those are the ones who stand to wield or be bled by Scott’s double-edged sword. Which, on a team wherein only four players are currently penciled in to be around past this season, could mean a lot of bleeding indeed.

Throughout their near 70-year history, the Lakers have time and again proved capable of rebuilding at a moment’s notice. It’s the kind of pull that comes with 16 banners lined about the rafters, the reward reaped from having survived and thrived so long squarely in the NBA spotlight.

Delusional as Scott’s remarks may sound, it’s at least an intentional delusion—one by which Scott aims to endear himself as the bearer of his team's time-tested torch to those who matter most: Lakers Nation. Its recent torpedoes of tumult be damned.