Rod Thorn announced Wednesday that he will keep Frank and have him return for the final year of his contract at $4.5 million. Here is what Thorn said about it:
“We are very happy to have him, and as far as we’re concerned, we’re very lucky to have him.”
But why did you take so long Rod if you were so confident?
“We wanted to look at whole operation and see where we were going and see ways we could improve it. There are ways to improve, but changing the coach, in my mind, was not one of the ways to improve it He’s a good coach. He’s done a good job here. This past year we weren’t expected to do very well but we did better than many expected us to. Our young players got better. I believe we’re on the right road.”
But what about his contract status? Lame duck coaches usually don’t work out (Except for Doc Rivers):
“He’ll handle it as he handles most things: with equanimity and class. He’s concerned with how well he can coach the team and how well he can be doing that, and any of those ancillary things he doesn’t care about.”
Well thanks for clearing all that up Rod. I am going to go right out and say it, this sucks. I mean don’t get me wrong Lawrence Frank is somewhat a decent coach (he’d have to be to last over 5 years now), but I would just have loved to see someone new coaching this team…someone who can run a play and just doesn’t go ISO for Vince when the game is on the line. I understand that you can’t run plays every possession, but coming out of timeouts and during late game possessions, plays should be run and we never seem to run any.
It just seems to me that this decision was made by the owner because they didn’t want to spend money on two coaches (If they would have fired Frank, they would have had to pay his salary as well as the new coach’s salary). Even though Ratner claims otherwise, I don’t believe him. Especially because you have the President claiming he is unsure that Frank’s voice is being heard, you have your All-Star PG agreeing with him, but you still don’t fire him. It is all about the money folks…
Who knows. Maybe Lawrence Frank will coach his ass off next year. Maybe we get the #1 pick, make the playoffs, and everyone forgets about this whole offseason “situation.” I am going to say it one more time though, if Lawrence Frank gets fired midseason and we are stuck with an interim head coach (instead of being able to hire our own this offseason), I will be pissed.
