Dan Hurley Opens Up About Getting Mocked By Fans For Refusing To Become LA Lakers Head Coach
Sep 26, 2025
Remember when the Los Angeles Lakers were searching for a new head coach last year after letting go of Darvin Ham?
Every fan knows the ending of this story: The Lakers selected JJ Redick, who helped the team pull off their first 50-win season in four years and clinch the third seed in the Western Conference playoffs. But here’s an often-overlooked part of this narrative: For a while, the purple-and-gold squad was pursuing someone else.
That someone was Dan Hurley, the UConn men’s basketball coach who had just led the Huskies to back-to-back NCAA championships. Appearing on “The Zach Lowe Show,” Hurley revealed that he had been getting grilled by Lakers fans earlier this year for supposedly passing up on the opportunity of a lifetime.
“That midseason trade for Luka, what’s your phone like when that happened?” Lowe asked Hurley. “Are you getting texts like, Hey, this could have been you!”
“Majority of it is, it’s Lakers fans direct messaging you that you’re the biggest moron. Look how stupid you are,” Hurley responded.
If fans sounded too passionate in reaching out to Hurley, it’s because they know his track record quite well. From 2016 to 2018, the 52-year-old mentor led the Rhode Island Rams to two NCAA tournament appearances. After a rough first couple of years with UConn, Hurley found his groove, pulling off a 165-69 record across five seasons and winning the national title in 2023 and 2024.
He added that, at the time the Lakers pulled off the Luka Doncic trade, his Huskies team wasn’t doing so well.
“We were not having the season that I thought I was gonna have,” Hurley said, recalling where the UConn men’s team was around February this year. “That trade goes down, and you’re getting a lot of those messages. Your mind goes there a little bit. ‘Man, you could have coached LeBron and Luka on the same team.’”
For the time being, the Lakers organization appears to be happy with the leadership that Redick provides. As such, Hurley can only wonder how his career would have turned out if he had accepted the Lakers’ offer back in the summer of 2024.
