Dan Hurley Gets Brutally Honest About Rejecting Lakers Job

With news of the Los Angeles Lakers extending head coach JJ Redick after just one season, it’s safe to poke fun at Redick and remind everyone that he wasn’t the Lakers’ first choice for the job. That honor belongs to UConn’s Dan Hurley.

After a weeks-long, dramatic courting of Hurley, the Lakers were ultimately rejected on their offer by the two-time NCAA national champ. Hurley has since said that the entire affair was not a leverage play, and in Hurley’s defense, he did at the time seem genuinely torn over whether or not to join the Lakers. Who wouldn’t be?

The idea of Hurley not strongly considering the Lakers is unrealistic. He’d just won back-to-back natties at UConn and had nothing left to prove at the college level. His stock was soaring, and this was the ultimate time to capitalize. However, Hurley and his wife Andrea ultimately decided that UConn was home.

This was all before the Lakers signed Luka Dončić.

If Hurley had known he’d be getting the opportunity to coach Luka and LeBron James on the same team, would his decision have turned out differently?

Hurley spoke with The Ringer’s Zach Lowe about this recently on The Zach Lowe Show.

“They trade for Luka,” Lowe said to Hurley. “What’s your phone like that day when that happens? … Are you getting texts like, ‘Hey, man, this could have been you.’”

“Yeah, I got some of those,” Hurley said. “But I’d say the majority of it (was) Lakers fans, you know, direct messaging you … (saying) that you’re the biggest moron, you know, ‘Look how stupid you are.’”

“(Meanwhile) … we’re not having the season (at UConn) … I thought I was gonna have,” Hurley continued. “Now, that trade goes down, and, yeah, I mean, you’re getting those messages, but then your mind also probably goes there a little bit, like, you know, ‘Man, you could have coached LeBron and Luka on the same team.’”

Hurley’s Huskies went 24-11 and got bounced in the second-round of the NCAA tournament in 2024-25, a wildly different experience than Hurley’s prior two seasons at UConn: a 68-11 record and two national titles.

As Hurley alluded to, the “off year” for UConn surely didn’t help him feel better about turning down the Lakers job, especially after the Luka signing.

That being said, Hurley doesn’t look and sound like a guy who regrets his decision. There are a lot of pressures that come with coaching the Lakers, and Hurley avoided all of that. He’s still sitting in one of the most enviable coaching seats in the basketball world … at the helm of the most successful college program of the 21st century. There’s nothing to regret about that.