Byron Scott was a fine player for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s as he helped them win 3 championships during the Showtime era. He spent 14 seasons as a player in the NBA and retired from professional basketball in 1998. Soon after that, Scott got into coaching as he joined the Sacramento Kings as an assistant that year, and he got a head coaching job just two years later.
Scott was hired by the New Jersey Nets in 2000 and while they had a rough first season, he led the team to the NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003. It remains the only two times that the Nets have made the Finals in the NBA, but Scott was surprisingly fired in 2004 and they were never quite the same after that.
Byron Scott Said He Got Tired Of The Politics As An NBA Coach
Something similar would follow in his next head coaching role with the New Orleans Hornets. Scott would lead them to back-to-back winning seasons in 2007-08 and 2008-09 while winning Coach of the Year in 2008, but a slow start to the 2009-10 campaign, which saw them win 3 of their first 9 games, saw him get the boot. While talking to his former teammate Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on an episode of his podcast, Scott spoke about his exits from the Nets and Hornets when asked about why the Nets fired him.
“Cap (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) you know what I asked myself that question for about a year when I was in Jersey and then I said ‘You know what? Life moves on.’ You know I didn’t understand it, to be honest with you. It’s kind of the same thing in New Orleans, I win Coach of the Year, we had more wins in that franchise’s history, the next year we had a ton of injuries, still make the playoffs (and) lose to Denver who eventually lost to the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals and get fired from that job. I think a lot of it was because of me not submitting to what they wanted. At times I would have GMs come in and say ‘We need you to play this guy, this guy.’ and I was like ‘Look man I’m gonna play the guys that I feel gonna give me a chance to win every single night.’ I have to look myself in the mirror because I would always say ‘You’re going to fire me anyway if I do what you want me to do or if I do what I want to do, you’re going to fire me anyway so I’m not gonna do what you want me to do and then you fire me anyway. I’m gonna do what I want to do, I’m gonna play the guys who I feel can help me win because at the end of the day, it’s gonna be the same alternative, you’re gonna fire me anyway.’ So it was just one of those things that after so long and after a while where you know it just grows on you and you get to the point where you just don’t want to deal with it anymore and that’s where I got the point in the league where I just didn’t want to deal with the politics of the league”
The politics just comes with the territory of being a head coach in the league, sadly. The ones who tend to fight back a bit, as Scott did, generally don’t tend to last very long, which explains why those teams got rid of him when they underperformed a bit.
Scott would go on to coach the Cavaliers and the Lakers, but both those teams weren’t really in a position to have any kind of success, and his coaching career would come to an end in 2016. For all the politics, Scott also had plenty of good memories from his time on the sidelines, and while he got to coach a lot of great players along the way, he named Baron Davis as the most talented point guard that he ever coached.
