The Los Angeles Lakers think Dan Hurley is a better coach than Mike Brown

On Monday, UConn Huskies head coach Dan Hurley officially declined the Los Angeles Lakers' offer to succeed Darvin Ham and become their new head coach.

Along with signaling that the Lakers would need to look elsewhere to find their next leading man, we also got another piece of insight: the specifics of the offer. The Lakers offered Hurley a six-year, 70-million dollar deal. That comes out to an average annual value of about 11.7 million dollars.

Why does this matter to us here at A Royal Pain?

Well, had Hurley accepted the offer, he would have become the sixth-highest paid coach in the NBA in terms of yearly salary — trailing behind only Steve Kerr (17.5 million per year), Gregg Popovich (16 million), Erik Spoelstra (15 million), Ty Lue (14 million), and Monty Williams (13.1 million).

More importantly, that 11.7 million dollar figure is 3.2 million dollars more per year than the average annual value of the extension that the Sacramento Kings just agreed to with Mike Brown.

That means that — at least to some degree — the Lakers view Hurley as a better coach than Brown. To some extent, this makes sense. As the brains behind the reigning back-to-back national champions, Hurley is widely viewed as one of the best coaches in college basketball.

However, Hurley has exactly zero wins as an NBA head coach (or an assistant coach, for that matter). Meanwhile, Brown has 441 regular season wins and 50 playoff wins as an NBA head coach under his belt. He's also been to one NBA Finals as a head coach and won two NBA titles as an assistant. Oh, and he's one of the better play-callers in the association (according to this study I conducted).

Now, I am not one of those people who thinks that a college coach can't parlay their success at that level to the professional game. But it is interesting to me that an NBA franchise would value a coach with no NBA pedigree so much higher than someone with so much proven success.