The L.A. Sparks Fired Coach Lynne Roberts, but She Isn't the Problem

Six straight missed playoffs, four coaches since 2016 and a midseason GM firing point at the people doing the hiring.

The Sparks fired coach Lynne Roberts on Friday, the morning after a 16-28 season ended, the Los Angeles Times reported. Special advisor Farhan Zaidi thanked her in the team's statement for her commitment through the final game.

They fired the wrong person.

Roberts lasted two seasons and went 36-49. The Sparks have now missed the playoffs six years running, every year since 2021, and Times reporter Marisa Ingemi counts four head coaches since the 2016 title under Brian Agler. When the coach keeps changing and the result doesn't, the coach was never the thing that needed fixing.

If you've bought Sparks tickets any summer since 2021, you've watched the same September. You're about to be sold the same fix, too: a coaching search this offseason, with no interim named yet. And the clock is running on Cameron Brink, whom the Times calls one of the league's best young players.

I wasn't courtside for any of it. This argument rests on the Times' reporting and the team's own moves, and the moves are the argument.

The roster kept moving

Roberts was hired ahead of the 2025 season to build around two young players, Brink and Rickea Jackson. Then general manager Raegan Pebley sent Jackson to Chicago in an offseason trade for Ariel Atkins, a two-time All-Star now signed for three years.

The Sparks fired Pebley midseason. All-Star guard Kelsey Plum, acquired along the way, was traded before the July deadline. On Sept. 4 the team hired Ariana Andonian, a former Philadelphia 76ers executive, as general manager. Three weeks later, the coach was gone.

Compare that with how Roberts got the job. She spent nearly a decade building Utah into a program that made three straight NCAA tournaments and back-to-back Sweet 16s. That's what her résumé says she can do with time. In Los Angeles she got two seasons, and one of the two young players she came to develop was traded by a GM who didn't make it to the end of the year.

The coach said it first

Before Thursday's loss to Golden State, Roberts said she believed she should keep the job. My first read was a coach lobbying for herself. Her reasoning changed my mind: “I think what this org needs is some stability, and a vision and a direction, like a plan.”

That isn't lobbying. It's the sharpest diagnosis I've read from anyone in that organization.

The franchise does know how to honor continuity. On Sept. 20 it unveiled a Lisa Leslie statue at Crypto.com Arena. Four days later, Nneka Ogwumike played her final game, the same loss that ended Roberts's run, closing what the Times called a 15-year career in a season without a playoff game, like the five before it. The Sparks can cast the past in bronze. The present keeps slipping through their hands.

Yes, she lost

Coaches get fired for losing, and 36-49 is losing. Roberts arrived billed as one of college basketball's best offensive minds, and the Times describes a team that never found consistency at either end of the floor. If you want to put that on her, the record gives you room.

But the move that did the most to reshape her roster was the general manager's, and the Sparks already fired that GM. Two firings in one season say the plan broke above the bench. The answer to that is supposed to be something other than another search.

An Aug. 27 Times column argued that owner Mark Walter should sell the team, promising new facility or not. I won't go that far today. But six straight lost Septembers belong to the people who pick the coaches, and on Friday they chose, once again, to change the coach.

The next one inherits long-term deals for Atkins and Dearica Hamby, plus Brink. Whoever takes the job should ask the front office for what Roberts asked for on her final night: “just give us a goalpost.”

Source: latimes.com, retrieved September 26, 2026.