Podcast: How much will the Lakers miss Ryan West?

The Los Angeles Lakers are now a fully West-free organization with Ryan stepping away from the franchise his dad helped achieve some pretty unrivaled success. Our hosts today discuss what this means, and why some might be making too big a deal of this right now.

The 30

In this episode, Jas is joined by SIlver Screen and Roll’s own Alex Regla. To kick things off, they discuss Ryan West, Jerry’s son, leaving the team as director of player personnel and what it means for the front office going forward. Will West join his dad across the hall with the Clippers, or was this move about looking for an expanded role with a new NBA team?

Alex and Jas also looked into who the Lakers may bring on to takeover West’s position, and what it means for the South Bay Lakers’ Nick Mazzella. Following that, the guys preview how the Jason Kidd/Frank Vogel dynamic will play out. Will the Lakers head coach have to constantly look over his shoulder with the Kidd lurking in the background? Alex and Jas also look back at Kidd’s previous stints as a head coach in Brooklyn and Milwaukee, and what his job will be with the Lakers this season.

To wrap things up, the guys give their predictions on if Kidd will eventually become the head coach of the Lakers.

You can listen to the latest episode below, and for more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

Locked on Lakers

Before we got to the weekly mailbag, Pete and I touched on West’s departure. We do this weird thing in analyzing things we can’t know very much about where we offer an often unearned benefit of the doubt to those whose names we know. Another recent example of this was the outcry when the Lakers hired Mike Penberthy as the team’s shooting coach and not “Lethal Shooter,” whose actual name is Chris Matthews, by the way.

With Ryan West, we knew of him and linked him (fairly obviously) to his dad. This isn’t to say we definitely won’t look back years from now and see this as a major loss, just that it’s probably too early to tell if it will be or not.

From there, we open the mailbag to discuss the Lakers’ best lineup and how we would defend them, how Luke Walton would handle this team, sandwiches and the teams out there we hate the most.

You can listen to the entire episode below, and make sure to subscribe on iTunes, where you can also leave questions in the form of a five-star review to guarantee your topic makes the show.