The Los Angeles Lakers seemed to get their off-season off to a good start by replacing championship-winning head coach Frank Vogel with championship-winning assistant coach Darvin Ham. Ham is coming from the Milwaukee Bucks, where his contributions in their 2021 Championship run were invaluable.
The Lakers have picked a young and exciting coach who is known to be a great player-manager. The signing is akin to the Cleveland Cavaliers taking a risk with Ty Lue for the 2016 season, a decision that worked out better than anyone could have expected.
Ham is stepping into the most high-pressure coaching job in the league as a rookie head coach. That would be extremely intimidating to most, but the Sanigwa, Michigan native has had much scarier experiences and cannot worry about the fallout from a job he took as a basketball coach.
Lakers coach Darvin Ham:
"I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. I was shot in the face by accident … You go through something like that, it's going to do one of two things. It's going to make you fearful or fearless. It made me fearless. I don't feel no pressure. It's basketball."
— Bryan Kalbrosky (@BryanKalbrosky) June 6, 2022
That is a pretty shocking story. Considering very few people can actually live to tell a tale like that, it is incredible to see Ham have become an NBA Champion as a player and then repeat it as an assistant coach. He has the prime opportunity to do that as a head coach with the biggest franchise in all of basketball, coaching the man many people call the GOAT in LeBron James.
Fellow Saginaw native Draymond Green had given flowers to Ham for getting the opportunity with the Lakers, talking about how important it is to a community of people that will look at Ham and believe they can achieve something big in their lives too.
Basketball is trivial when it comes to the real world and the struggles people go through. Ham is much stronger mentally as a result of these experiences, something that will help immensely when they are on the court as multi-millionaires to win a basketball game.
