Luke Walton and great expectations

Luke Walton is the new head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, and that is a great opportunity for any aspiring head coach. First of all, Walton will be coming home to the team where he spent most of his NBA career, and where he won two championships coming off the bench. Secondly, he is coming off a tremendous 24-0 regular season start and 39-4 record overall as interim head coach for the defending champion Golden State Warriors. Those feats caught the attention of a lot of league fans around the world. Third, he is entering a very rare situation where the Lakers will give him practically a clean slate. Kobe Bryant has just retired and the team has just registered its two worst seasons.

Walton, the son of all-time great UCLA, Portland Trailblazers and Boston Celtics center Bill Walton, briefly led the NBA in three-point shooting when the league experimented with a new type of synthetic ball in 2006. He won championships with the Lakers in 2009 and 2010, and was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2012. Last season was his first as an assistant coach, and the Warriors won their first title in decades. This season, Walton was promoted to first lead assistant coach, filling in a vacancy. Warriors head coach Steve Kerr gives Walton a lot of credit for helping create the atmosphere of humility and sharing that has helped the team overcome adversity on its way to a record-breaking 73-9 regular season win-loss record.

When Dwight Howard headlined an NBA Madness event in the Philippines after his rookie season, Walton and his brothers also played in a celebrity match that included comedians Ariel and Maverick, improvisational comedy pioneer Gabe Mercado, TV personality turned political candidate Chiqui Roa-Puno, basketball personalities such as Richard del Rosario, and this writer. The Waltons and their local teammates all wore Kobe Bryant jerseys, while Dwight Howard and his group all wore his Orlando Magic uniform. Luke Walton displayed the gat shooting form that got him into the NBA from Arizona in the first place. He was soft-spoken and approachable, forming a bond with the Filipino fans who knew him both as a Laker and as the son of a legend.

Walton informed the Lakers that he cannot attend to the team’s needs until the Warriors’ season is over, obviously. But what will face him in the months after June? Firstly, the Lakers will have to determine what their new identity will be in the post-Kobe Bryant era. Traditionally, they have succeeded most often with a dominant big man like a George Mikan from the Minneapolis days, to Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal. In recent years, that search for an elusive one-of-a-kind center resulted in a disappointing experiment with Dwight Howard, made more frustrating by injuries to Steve Nash. Will there be anyone the team can shop for, and will they have to offer too much and have little bench depth left in exchange?

For the next few weeks at least, the fate of the current Lakers on the roster hangs in the balance. Minus Bryant, it is a mix of young players trying to make a name for themselves and a few older players, with Jordan Clarkson a legitimate bright spot, and one of three Lakers averaging double figures for the team. But when you look at it, this is a very similar situation to the one Golden State faced when new owners bought the team in 2010: the leading scorer left, and young guards were put together to take the team in a new direction. With Walton there, you can bet much of the Warriors’ culture will be instilled in the team’s youngsters, though the glamorous atmosphere and bigger media spotlight in Los Angeles may provide some additional distractions to the gestation of that new culture.

But all in all, how many chances does one get to coach one of the most popular teams in league history, one that has often carried the highest price tag, as well? Besides the history of winning, perhaps one of the things that may also have to evolve is the laid-back attitude of the fans, at least for the meantime. Winning will not come right away, so they’d better be prepared to mitigate their expectations. Will the fans stay in their seats as the team goes through its learning curve under its new head coach? Walton will have the advantage of having player Laker ball, and against a couple of those in the line-up. At 36, he’s actually a year younger than Bryant, but has a lone NBA title under his belt, and is working on his second one before jumping the fence. That carries a lot of weight when you walk into the locker room at the start of training camp.

This is also one of the rarer times when the Lakers will have had plenty of rest before training camp opens. Often, they have been fighting for championships or have gone deep into the playoffs, allowing little time for physical recovery. So fatigue will not be an issue, regardless of how hard Walton plans to be on the players. At the end of the day, it is an excellent situation for Walton, if he is allowed the free hand to pretty much do whatever he wants based on what he’s learned with the Warriors. That in itself is a great irony, that Golden State is helping Los Angeles learn how to win again. That hasn’t happened since Chamberlain left the Warriors when they were still in Philadelphia and joined Los Angeles in 1968.