Lakers Rumors: LA's Rift with Mike Brown Will Doom Them Against OKC
What would a day be without problems in Lakerland?
In the last week, Lakers' head coach Mike Brown has stirred the pot by benching both All-Star's Kobe Bryant and Andrew Bynum.
There was next to no backlash following Bryant's benching but Bynum's immaturity could lead to another thing all together. Bynum's not mature enough to let things go or even understand that winning a championship is about a collective team effort and not about one guy.
Bynum's ill-advised three-pointer, just a couple games after getting ejected for a couple ill-advised technicals, landed him a seat on the pine, but his attitude afterwards suggested he's going to do the same the next chance he gets, which is not what the Lakers need.
"I guess, 'Don't take 3s' is the message, but I'm going to take another one and I'm going to take some more, so I just hope it's not the same result," Bynum said after being benched against Golden State.
If he does though and it is met with the same results, we are going to see a huge rift in the Lakers locker room.
Brown is certainly part of the problem, but whether Bynum likes it or not, he's the coach of the team. That's just something he's got to deal with.
He's made it clear that it's his team and he's not going to change the way he coaches it, telling ESPN's Brian Kamenetzky:
""I'm going to coach the team how I think I need to coach it. It's as simple as that," Brown said Wednesday after practice in El Segundo. "If I feel like I need to make a sub, then I'll make a sub. If I feel like we're not getting production from certain guys out on the floor -- production the right way -- then I'll make a change. I don't think it's any more complicated than that."
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What all of this means is there's a lot of stubbornness, right now, in the Lakers' locker room and that will likely lead to plenty of unnecessary distractions.
Those type of distractions will ultimately doom this team if things get out of control.
That starts tonight against Oklahoma City where if the Lakers focus more on the circus that their locker room is becoming, instead of on a total team effort, they have next to no chance of taking care of business against the Thunder.
We've seen how sideshow antics can defeat a team. We've also seen how a team acting as a team can prevail.
Just look at Dallas over Miami last year in the NBA Finals. The focused team wins more often than not.
That's what the Lakers need to get back to.
If they don't, it's going to turn into superstars vs. coach and the Lakers can't afford that to happen, especially not this late in the season when they are trying to make a run at another championship.
All of this other stuff can do nothing but destroy them in the end.
