Paul Westphal isn't the first NBA coach to lose a battle with a player, but he may be the first to get fired over someone who might not be worth the trouble.
That's the uncertainty concerning the Sacramento Kings' decision to can Westphal on Thursday. Former Golden State coach Keith Smart will replace Westphal immediately.
The young Kings won just two of their first seven games and sported a 51-120 record in Westphal's two-plus seasons. But the firing likely has more to do with his clashes with second-year big man DeMarcus Cousins.
Again, this isn't a first. When it comes to coaches vs. players in the NBA, coaches almost never win.
Magic Johnson pretty much doomed Paul Westhead with the L.A. Lakers back in 1982, and not long after the Lakers won a title. More recently, Jerry Sloan ended a decades-long run in Utah after quarreling with point guard Deron Williams.
But Johnson was a Hall-of-Famer who went on to win four championships after Westhead. Williams is now an All-Star with New Jersey.
Cousins, on the other hand, is very young and owns a questionable history when it comes to listening to coaches and getting along with teammates. He has been mostly inconsistent and entirely too difficult in his brief career. Nobody is going to turn around a franchise based on Cousins alone. Basically, we're not talking about LeBron James here.
The Westphal-Cousins feud dates to last season, but it took on new life earlier this week. That's when Westphal said Cousins demanded a trade, then sent Cousins home before a game against New Orleans.
Westphal even released a statement on the matter, saying Cousins “continually, aggressively” made it known he was “unwilling or unable to embrace traveling in the same direction as his team.”
Cousins put out a denial, and just like that an organization that had been expected to celebrate athleticism, firepower and the hype surrounding lottery pick Jimmer Fredette suddenly took another public relations hit.
Firing Westphal isn't likely to fix that, either. Not even Smart can save the Kings now.
Instead, all this potentially does is help Cousins feel vindicated. And who could blame him? Wouldn't you feel that way if you acted disruptively and your boss quickly got the ax?
That's not to say Westphal was the perfect match for this team. He led Charles Barkley and Phoenix to the Finals in the early 1990s, but Barkley and Kevin Johnson were largely to thank. That was a Suns team loaded with veterans, men who understood their roles and shared the ball.
Today's Kings are a different story. They're not bad guys, and that includes Cousins. They just have a lot to learn and require an extremely patient and willing teacher.
Is Smart that guy? Hard to tell, as the Kings haven't exactly made splashes with their coaching hires in recent years. Since the glory days of Rick Adelman earlier this century, they've delivered Eric Musselman, Reggie Theus, Kenny Natt and Westphal.
Musselman may have been the best of the bunch -- but his refusal to run the Princeton offense insisted on by GM Geoff Petrie resulted in just one short season.
Now, it's up to Smart to try to make this work, reaching the likes of not just Cousins, but Tyreke Evans and J.J. Hickson as well.
Those three represent the new band of Kings -- good guys, but ones who don't quite get it. Westphal can't be entirely at fault for that. He was, after all, coaching grown men.
So now it's up to Smart to reach all these young guns, teaching the value of sharing the ball on offense and occasionally bending their knees and shuffling their feet on defense. And when it comes to Cousins and Evans, the team's most talented players, Smart might want to mention the concept of giving an honest day's effort, too.
Good luck.
If it doesn't work, the Kings will have only themselves to blame. Because the bottom line is, they can't keep firing coaches. Especially when they're still not sure what they have in the young big man who's the biggest reason Westphal was let go.
Follow Sam Amico on Twitter @SamAmicoFSO
