Here's why Dan Hurley going to the Lakers never really made sense

Now that it's over, let’s acknowledge the obvious thing about Dan Hurley's weekend-long flirtation with the Los Angeles Lakers before deciding to stay at Connecticut on Monday.

None of it made sense.

It didn’t make sense for the Lakers, supposedly a win-now team in the twilight of LeBron James’ career, to have a college coach with zero NBA history learning on the job. 

It didn’t make sense for Hurley, a raging maniac sideline control freak who would have never survived an 82-game season with NBA players coaching the way he does with the Huskies and at every stop prior to that in his career. 

And the choreography of the story definitely didn’t make any sense, with one of the most prolific NBA insiders reporting late last week that JJ Redick was on track to get the job only to have his biggest competitor — who just so happened to have written the definitive book on the Hurley family basketball dynasty 20 years ago — come back two days later to drop the bombshell and spark an entire weekend of content that even overwhelmed the NBA Finals. 

Somebody got played here. Maybe it was all of us.

Was this proposed marriage actually real? We have to assume it was because people involved with the Lakers and around Hurley both made clear it was his job to take or pass up. 

But was it ever really going to happen, especially given the obvious incentive for Hurley to take this conversation all the way to the finish line before turning back? 

I don’t believe it. Not for a second. 

Here’s what I do believe.

On the night UConn won its second consecutive national championship, Hurley was asked about potential interest in the Kentucky job after John Calipari bolted for Arkansas. Maybe Hurley had been so disconnected from the news while preparing his team for Purdue that he truly didn’t realize Kentucky would be among the first things that would come up after cutting down the nets.

Or maybe he just isn’t as savvy as someone like Calipari, who has been a master at milking schools for raises and contract extensions by feigning interest in other jobs. That night, Hurley brushed off the Kentucky talk with a series of glib comments that made it clear that he wasn’t interested. 

Leverage? Gone. If he wasn't taking Kentucky, where else was he going? As UConn and Hurley dug in on contract talks, there was no threat to poach him and thus no reason to fear he would leave even if the negotiations got sticky. 

Here’s what else I believe: When word got out via Shams Charania of The Athletic last Tuesday that the Lakers were “zeroing in” on Redick, it put some people in a difficult spot. 

It put ESPN in a difficult spot because Redick is on the broadcast team for the NBA Finals. But it also put the Lakers in a difficult spot because of the appearance that they were just going to hand the job to James’ friend and podcast partner without doing an actual search for the most qualified coach they could hire. Regardless of how you feel about Redick, it would be fairly unorthodox and potentially controversial for someone to go from a playing career to the broadcast booth to Lakers' head coach in just a few short years with no coaching experience in between.

But it was not possible for the Lakers to both be “zeroing in” on Redick as the next coach while also flying Hurley to LA and offering him, according to the Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman, somewhere in the neighborhood of six years and $70 million. 

Only one of those two things can be true. 

But what if they were both right — in a way?

Think about who would benefit, theoretically, if the Lakers and Hurley both went through this big public courtship while both sides knew that he was most likely going to stay at UConn for a variety of reasons including his family and the chance to three-peat in the NCAA tournament next year? 

Hurley, of course, would definitely benefit because he suddenly had the leverage again to push UConn into action on getting his contract done and making him one of the highest-paid coaches in college basketball. Being able to say that he turned down both Kentucky and the Lakers in the same offseason is a pretty decent recruiting pitch, too. 

The Lakers win because not only do they avoid paying a boatload of money to a coach who is a pretty big gamble at the NBA level, but Rob Pelinka and Jeanie Buss can look their fans in the eyes and say they did everything possible to get a big name coach before giving the job to Redick or whoever. 

And, of course, ESPN won because Adrian Wojnarowski had a genuine, massive scoop over his biggest competitor in the ongoing basketball insiders’ turf war. Given the crossover in this story between arguably the biggest fan base in the NBA and college basketball’s premiere program, the NBA Finals was at best the third-biggest topic on ESPN’s offering of talk shows for a couple days behind Hurley and Caitlin Clark. 

To be clear, Hurley’s long-term interest in the NBA is almost certainly real and he may one day go down the same path as Calipari, Rick Pitino, Lon Kruger, Leonard Hamilton and others in trying his hand at the highest level of basketball. 

The Lakers’ offer to Hurley was clearly real, and they probably did everything they could to lay out the vision for how he could make a clean transition to the NBA and how the roster would eventually change once James calls it quits. 

His decision was probably pretty difficult. There’s no guarantee such a prime NBA opportunity will come around again. 

But making it such a big, public show and dragging it out over four days — only to leave the Lakers in the lurch — is not the way these things typically go down unless there was a purpose behind it. 

Keep in mind, the Lakers fired Darvin Ham more than a month ago. UConn’s contract extension with Hurley probably should have been done a couple weeks before that. 

The notion that Hurley was suddenly the guy the Lakers had to get in the first week of June, or that Hurley suddenly had this NBA itch he needed to scratch, felt slightly less than organic — even if the possibility of him leaving was real.

In the end, Hurley belongs at UConn and in college basketball, where his roster-building and player development system works. Dropping him in to coach LeBron and Anthony Davis was a disaster waiting to happen. 

Staying in Storrs was the right outcome for Hurley, the Lakers and UConn — even if everyone got played a little bit along the way.