Honestly, I think Luke’s Warriors experience is just the tip of the iceberg. The overall combination of his personality + his tenure as a Lakers player + his time at UOM and the D-Fenders in addition to his time with the Warriors works to his advantage for this particular gig.

I think those specific experiences give him a grasp on aspects of managing strong personalities that Messina may not. Plus so much of Luke’s coaching career has been spent with younger players as opposed to the veterans on The Spurs, who have had relatively few bumps in the road and have been the model of stability on all fronts for so long on a team filled with veteran leadership that I wonder how Messina would handle some of the quirkier aspects of this youthful group.

He’s definitely more of an unknown quantity than Messina but given the fact that, IMO, the best candidates for this gig are all relatively unproven on this level I think he stands out from the mix of himself, Ollie, and Messina for this job in this city with this group of youngsters. I’d love to be a fly on the wall of their interviews to get a better grasp on what they’d like to do with this roster, who they think they can recruit in FA, and what their 3 year goals are.

It’s awfully hard to see Luke or Messina coming here to take an assistants job to sit under the other guy, but there may be something enticing if they both got a significant pay raise to take their respective strengths and build the next chapter of Lakers legacy from scratch in tandem.

That said I’m good if it’s either of those two or Kevin Ollie. It would be infuriating to see them pass on Byron just to bring in a codger like JVG or recent cuckold like Blatt. If that’s the route they wind up taking then they should have just given Byron another shot.