What Darvin Ham’s first assistant coaching hires say about his approach

Darvin Ham has barely gotten his feet wet in Los Angeles, but he’s already hard at work.

Ham was officially introduced Monday as the new head coach of the Lakers and impressively passed his first test by nailing the question and answer portion of his media availability. The rookie head coach answered confidently, was firm and sounded every bit like a person who has a clear direction in mind for his new team.

While his first public outing was a resounding success, on Tuesday, he set off to begin handling his first crack at the behind-the-scenes portions of the job. According to Adrian Wojnarowski and Dave McMenamin, Ham informed several members of last season’s coaching staff that they will not be retained heading into the year. David Fizdale, Mike Penberthy and John Lucas III were among the names reported.

Despite attempting to craft his staff according to his vision, Ham chose to not completely clean the slate, as it was also reported that the team will be retaining both Phil Handy and Quinton Crawford — holdovers from Frank Vogel’s staff.

While there is still plenty of work left to do, and potentially more additions and subtractions to the previous regime, Ham has already made his presence known, which brings us to today’s episode.

On this week’s edition of Talk-O-Tuesday, our hosts Alex Padilla and Alex Regla discussed Ham’s construction of his coaching staff thus far, and what it potentially signals about the team’s direction heading into the year.

The duo also discussed their general takeaways from Ham’s first few days in Los Angeles, and how much his comments regarding Russell Westbrook should be taken with a grain of salt.

You can listen to the full episode below, and to make sure you never miss a show, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

And for a short-form recap pod, check out Lakers Lowdown, in which Anthony Irwin recaps the previous day’s news and gets you ready for the day ahead in LakerLand, every weekday morning on the Silver Screen & Roll Podcast feed.