Dan Hurley will not become the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, and his wife may have played in big role in the decision. While appearing on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, the Connecticut Huskies men’s basketball head coach shared his wife’s reaction to being offered the Lakers job.
“She was crying in the beginning,” Hurley admitted. “The first couple days of it, she got violently angry and emotional, not like hitting me and stuff. …She got emotional like, ‘I can’t believe you’re bringing this. Our life is so great. It’s perfect. Our lives couldn’t be better and now you’re bringing this s***.’
“She was bad in the beginning, but then she warned up to it when we got out there and she met Rob [Pelinka] and she met Jeanie [Buss] and felt the weather. We drove around Manhattan Beach and just met the people though mostly and she saw the vision of it. She was into it, but when we got back to Connecticut without having made a decision and we got back home, we both flipped back.”
Hurley rejected a six-year, $70 million contract offer from the Lakers. He was targeted by the team after leading UConn to back-to-back national titles.
Dan Hurley explains why he’s staying at UConn
“To leave, there probably is [a number],” he said. “To leave a place at any moment in your life, to say that it’s not a motivating factor … the finances to leave a place is definitely a thing. To stay at a place, I don’t think it is ever going to be a thing. To stay somewhere like UConn, it would never have been a financial thing.
“This wasn’t like some pressure tactic to make me the highest-paid college coach. That was already done. But to leave a place that you feel the way we do and the family connection with my wife, my sons, my mother-in-law, my father … I know how much it means to my dad to go to the Big East tournament and come to 10 UConn games a year at home, sitting courtside, when I’m coaching against Rick Pitino. To leave all of that behind, there probably is a number.”
The Lakers continue their coaching search after Hurley turned them down. Since 2011, Los Angeles has had seven different head coaches, and the only one to have any success is Frank Vogel who helped the Lakers win a championship in 2020.
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