The Lakers just fired a coach who took over a 33-49 team two years ago and turned them into an in-season tournament champion and a team that basically outplayed Denver for most of their recent series loss.

The Lakers just didn’t just fire their current coach, they fired their coach of the future, and that’s just madness.

“I think Darvin Ham is a helluva coach,” said the Nuggets’ coach Michael Malone earlier this week. “That’s not an easy job. I think Darvin does it with class. He’s a good man, a good coach … and hopefully he’ll be around there a long time because he deserves to be.”

Nope. Not here. Not with an organization that has gone through seven coaches in the last dozen years. Not with a star player who has gone through three coaches in six years.

The Lakers are that rare family operation that continually lops off the head of the family for the sake of one of the whining kids.

The Lakers continually forget that the most important name is the one on the front of the jersey, they continually lack the patience to reestablish a competitive world-class Laker culture at the expense of a me-first-me-now superstar culture.

Ham was taking big strides toward building culture, but he made the players angry when he benched some of them at inopportune times, and he made some late-game mistakes, and he suffered a bit of a sophomore slump like many star rookie head coaches, so now he’s been knee-capped.

OK, LeBron James, so who’s next?

Everyone knows this is ultimately about you, and who you think can perform the impossible task of winning a title in your final seasons, so let’s just be honest.

Make the hire, LeBron. Just make it and be done with it.

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