LOS ANGELES — The winless New Jersey Nets fired coach Lawrence Frank on Sunday, a few hours before they attempted to avoid matching the worst start in NBA history.
Assistant Tom Barrise temporarily replaced his friend, but the Nets remained 0-for-the-season with a 106-87 loss to the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers.
Though Frank’s departure had been widely rumored while New Jersey lost every game in the season’s first 4 1/2 weeks, Frank’s players claimed they were shocked when their energetic coach showed up at their morning meeting in Los Angeles not wearing his Nets gear.
“It’s tough, because he was the hardest worker on the team,” center Brook Lopez said.
The Nets won’t choose a permanent replacement for Frank until they return from their four-game road trip today.
Frank’s 225 victories are the most in franchise history, and he had a career .500 record before this disastrous, injury-plagued season. He also was the longest-tenured coach in the Eastern Conference.
Frank replaced Byron Scott in January 2004 and began his career with a 13-game winning streak, the best coaching start in league history. His final losing streak was even longer, though he was fired hours before New Jersey matched the 17-game skids by the 1988-89 Miami Heat and the 1999 Los Angeles Clippers.
U.S. skier Lanning has fractured vertebra
CALGARY, Alberta — The U.S. Ski Team says TJ Lanning has a fractured vertebra in his neck and a dislocated left knee from a crash during the season- opening World Cup downhill.
U.S. Ski Team spokesman Tom Kelly said the 25-year-old Lanning, of Park City, Utah, has full movement but that his injuries are “clearly season-ending.”
Lanning was injured Saturday at Lake Louise, Alberta, and taken to a Calgary hospital. He will be moved to a hospital in Vail.
• Canada’s Manuel Osborne- Paradis won the season-opening super giant slalom for his second career World Cup victory.
Osborne-Paradis finished in 1 minute, 32.93 seconds.
Ted Ligety was the top American, finishing eighth in 1:33.87.
• Norway’s Petter Northug won the men’s 15-kilometer classic style World Cup race in Kuusamo, Finland, while American Kris Freeman finished a career-best fourth.
Freeman’s showing was the best nonsprint finish for a U.S. skier in a World Cup race since March 1983, when Tim Caldwell was second in a 15K in Anchorage, Alaska.
Footnotes.
Damon Duval kicked a 33-yard field goal with no time left — after getting a second chance because of a Saskatchewan penalty — in the Grey Cup to give the Montreal Alouettes a 28-27 victory over the Roughriders in Calgary. Duval missed moments earlier from 43 yards, but the Roughriders were penalized for having 13 men on the field.
• Pittsburgh Penguins left winger Matt Cooke was suspended for two games without pay by the NHL for a deliberate check to the head area of New York Rangers center Artem Anisimov on Saturday night.
The Associated Press
