With the Lakers’s hiring of Darvin Ham now official as of Friday, 15 of the NBA’s 30 teams will have a Black head coach for the first time in league history.
Ham, 48, will take up the mantle as the 28th Lakers coach nearly 10 years after his brief stint with the club as an assistant. Prior to Friday’s announcement of the former player’s hiring, NBA commissioner Adam Silver addressed the NBA’s increase in Black coaches during a Thursday news conference prior to Game 1 of the 2022 NBA Finals.
“This isn’t unique to the NBA — and I’ve learned this from other businesses — is that you have to talk about these issues all the time,” Silver said, per Andscape. “If you care about diversity and inclusion in your workplace, you’ve got to look at the data. You’ve got to constantly present it to your colleagues, to your department heads, to your teams, and it has to become a focus. It’s my job in part to say that’s a priority for this organization.”
