20 of Byron Scott's most head-scratching quotes as Lakers coach

Byron Scott was fired Sunday after a brief, tumultuous tenure as Los Angeles Lakers head coach that featured the two worst seasons in franchise history.

During that time, Scott said some curious things. Here are a few of his greatest hits:

Setting the bar high

When Scott took over the job, he had what turned out to be delusions of grandeur:

"I'm going to walk into our locker room the first day of our meeting and say, 'I want to win a championship.' I don’t want us thinking it's fine if we just make the playoffs or think we have no shot at making the playoffs. I don't believe that. I want our guys to have the same mindset as I do."

On developing young players

Scott's edicts about player development often seemed to miss the point of rebuilding:

"I'm not going to be patient for long," he said. "I expect guys to get it on both ends of the floor in a relatively quick manner."

Later, he added: "I'm not always thinking about necessarily developing them. I'm always thinking about trying to win."

Ahem.

Of benching rookies D'Angelo Russell and Julius Randle, he said: "I still think at this point in their career, with a quarter of the season done, you can still learn some things by sitting there watching as well."

Of why he benched them, he said: "This is more of a team sport, so I need them to learn how to play off each other and not with the ball all the time as well."

(Russell and Randle ranked first and second on the team in passes thrown per game, and it wasn't close.)

Of whether the Lakers could land a franchise player in free agency, rather than develop one from within, Scott said: "That would be nice."

On analytics

Scott never quite embraced the tenets of the modern NBA.

"I don't knock people who believe in it," Scott said of analytics. "That’s their prerogative. But I'm just more of an old school type guy."

Among other things, that meant drastically suppressing the number of 3-pointers the Lakers attempted, at a time the rest of the NBA was finding ways to launch more.

"Our game plan is really to get to that basket," Scott said. "I like the fact that we only shot 10 threes. If we shoot between 10 and 15, I think that's a good mixture of getting to that basket and shooting threes."

Even after the Lakers relented and started shooting more threes, Scott said: "It's still not, to me, a remedy to winning championships."

The defending champs might disagree.

Force-feeding Swaggy

There was nothing analytically sound about Scott's plan to bust Nick Young out of his shooting funk:

"Really going to try to force-feed him a little bit more tomorrow, see if we can get him going early,"

Contradictions

Scott had a way of contradicting himself, sometimes in the same breath:

Of his team's on-court dynamic, he said: "We don't have chemistry problems. Our guys get along. We just don't trust each other on the floor."

Of his issue with Russell's temperament, he said: "I love the fact that he has confidence. When it gets to the point where it's cockiness, then we've got a problem."

Kobe's endless leash

Much of Scott's hypocrisy was borne out in the double-standard by which he judged aging star Kobe Bryant compared to the rest of the team.

After a game in which Bryant chucked his way to 1-of-14 shooting in a 34-point loss, Scott said: "He has that privilege, basically."

Asked whether he'd consider bringing a struggling Bryant off the bench, he said: "I would never, never, never do that. That's not an option whatsoever."

"Manning up"

Scott had some fairly simplistic notions of what it would take for the Lakers to improve their lot.

"It’s all about manning up," Scott said after one blowout loss.

"We were soft, period," he said after another. "I told them to man up, basically."

For all his bloviating about the importance of defense and toughness, Scott has coached five consecutive teams with defensive ratings that rank 26th in the NBA or worse.

On fatigue

Apparently manning up meant ignoring or fighting through fatigue.

After running his team ragged in training camp, then watching them shoot 29 percent in their preseason opener, Scott said: "You can always say it's tired legs. That to me is an excuse."

On how to change the outcome, he said: "They'll just have to kind of fight through that fatigue part of it. And I think mentally it gets them a little stronger anyway."