Los Angeles Lakers head coach Darvin Ham said that he had around 50 text messages when he checked his phone after a report surfaced regarding his status with the team.
“I had like 50 texts when I checked my phone that day,” Ham told Bleacher Report. “I’m not on social media, so I don’t know what people are saying. But I’m getting text messages saying, ‘Hang in there. Are you OK? It’s going to be OK. I’m here for you.’ I thought somebody died. That was my initial reaction. Then someone sent me story with some unnamed sources and I was like, ‘This s—?’ Everything is going to be alright. We’ve got a good team. We just got more work to do.”
A report surfaced earlier this month detailing a rumored disconnect between Ham and the Lakers locker room.
When the report surfaced, Ham and the Lakers were in the middle of a losing streak and playing arguably their worst basketball of the 2023-24 regular season. But the Purple and Gold have shown some signs of life lately, picking up wins in two out of their last three games.
First, the Lakers put their losing streak to an end with a win over the Los Angeles Clippers at home on Jan. 7. LeBron James scored a team-high 25 points for the Lakers in their three-point victory.
Then, the Lakers earned a one-point victory over the Toronto Raptors two days later. This time, it was big man Anthony Davis who ended up as the team’s leading scorer. In 40 minutes of play, he finished with 41 points to go along with 11 rebounds and six assists while shooting 13-of-17 from the floor and 2-of-2 from 3-point range.
However, Los Angeles suffered a home loss to the Phoenix Suns in the team’s most recent game on Thursday. James and Davis both had very forgettable performances in the loss, as the former scored just 10 points while the latter ended up with 13.
The Suns — who snapped a two-game losing streak with their win over the Lakers — are now 1.5 games ahead of Los Angeles in the Western Conference standings at 20-18 and sit as the No. 8 seed in the conference. The Lakers, on the other hand, currently own the No. 10 seed in the conference with a 19-20 record.
While the Lakers have had a rocky start to the season, the team is still in the Western Conference playoff hunt and has plenty of time to climb up the standings with more than 40 games remaining on its regular-season schedule.
