Daily News | Jump to the Lakers? Please. Doc Rivers has to do his job with the Sixers first. | Mike Sielski
Doc Rivers couldn’t stomach it, the unseemliness of it all. Three thousand miles to the west, the Lakers had waited about six-and-a-half seconds, following the end of a season of great expectations and lousy results, to leak that they were firing Frank Vogel. And it didn’t take much more time for Rivers’ name to surface, twice in the Los Angeles Times, as Vogel’s possible replacement.
If only the feeling were mutual throughout Philadelphia. The Sixers will go into Game 1 on Saturday against the Toronto Raptors with 51 victories, with the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference, and with a foreboding sense around them that they’re setting everyone up for another springtime disappointment.
Look, Rivers is a fine coach. He won a championship with the Celtics in 2008, and over the last 15 NBA seasons, his teams in Boston, with the Clippers, and here have made the playoffs 14 times. But he wasn’t hired here to be fine. He was hired here to be an improvement over Brett Brown, to be a primary reason that the Sixers finally advanced beyond the second round.
The 2019-20 Clippers, with Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, fell apart in the Orlando bubble, burping up a three-games-to-one lead to the Nuggets, one player after another violating the league’s COVID-19 protocols. The quality of Simmons’ play already had regressed under Rivers before the Atlanta debacle, and now assimilating Harden into the lineup and maximizing his skills and production have been Rivers’ sternest tests of the season.
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