Who's on
top?
Jackson's
departure means game's best coach is up for debate
Posted @ CNNSI.com : by John Hollinger Tuesday November
16, 2004 3:49PM; Updated: Tuesday November 16, 2004 3:50PM
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With Phil
Jackson now busy hawking books and pontificating on the state of the league
rather than burnishing his Hall of Fame coaching credentials, the identity of
the league's best current coach is not easily determined.
Some
might say it's presumptuous of me to declare that Jackson was the best since he
always had supremely talented players at his disposal. But winning nine championships
in 14 seasons in a 29-team league speaks for itself, not to mention his ridiculous
41-5 record in playoff series.
In
Jackson's absence, several other coaches have shown they are worthy of the honor
as the NBA's best. Larry Brown, Gregg Popovich, Rudy Tomjanovich
and Lenny Wilkens all have won championships (although Wilkens won his
back in the days when the NBA was less popular than dwarf tossing). However, to
choose among them and several other active coaches with gaudy records, I need
to set up an objective way to rate the largely subjective topic of coaching performance.
Unfortunately,
coaching in the NBA is an increasingly precarious occupation. Impatient executives
provide most coaches with the job security of an Apprentice contestant,
while prima donna players reduce many to having about as much as power as the
Swiss navy. As a result, only a few have persevered. Of the 30 active NBA coaches,
just 13 have at least five years of experience, and only two have stayed with
the same team.
Since
the ones with less than five years of experience haven't provided enough of a
window for me to systematically rate their career performance, I'm going to limit
the discussion today to those 13 coaches. My criteria to objectively measure
their performances is a simple one: winning. I'm not just looking at wins, however.
I'm looking at wins compared to expected wins. Jackson, for instance, should be
expected to win more games with his Bulls and Lakers than, say, Mike Woodson
with this year's Hawks. Thus, if a team was expected to win 25 games and the coach
won 30, I'll give him a +5. If the team was expected to win 55 games and the coach
only won 60, I'll give him a -5, even though he won twice as many games as the
guy who got a +5.
To
determine how many games the coach was expected to win, I pieced together a simple
formula: The team's winning percentage the previous season (two parts), the team's
winning percentage from two seasons previous (one part), and a .500 season (one
part). I included the .500 season to adjust for the fact that a coach with 60
wins every year for a decade would otherwise show up as "+0." Similarly,
a coach who went 10-72 every year would have the same mark even though he was
awful. Because the draft and the salary cap conspire to level the playing field,
it's a necessary addition. Finally, one other caveat -- I only used the coach's
record from seasons where he coached at least 50 percent of the team's games.
Using
this formula, we can evaluate over time how a coach has fared against the expectation.
For example, Brown won 54 games with the Pistons last season, after they
had won 50 the previous two seasons. Based on the formula, he was expected to
win 49 games, so he gets a +5 for winning 54. Summing those up over all 24 seasons
of Brown's career, we find that he's +114, or about five games better than expected
each season.
That's
impressive, but is it the best? Let's take a look at how the 13 coaches in the
study grade out, starting at the bottom:
Nos.
11-13: The retreads
Mike
Dunleavy, Paul Silas and Bernie Bickerstaff . Perhaps "retreads"
is a bit harsh -- seeing these three names shows just how good a coach somebody
has to be to even last five years in the NBA. Despite ranking at the bottom of
the list, all three have had impressive moments in the NBA. Bickerstaff became
the first coach to win a playoff series as a No. 8 seed when he led the Nuggets
past Seattle in 1994, Dunleavy took a team full of delinquents to consecutive
Western Conference finals appearances, and Silas had an impressive run in Charlotte/New
Orleans. But each has had his Waterloo as well -- Bickerstaff's was in Washington,
Dunleavy's a miserable four-year run in Milwaukee (22 games below expectation),
and Silas's a quarter-century ago when he went 17-65 with the Clippers.
Nos.
8-10: The company men
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Wilkens,
Tomjanovich and Hubie Brown. Two of them have won championships and two are
old enough to have been passengers on the Mayflower, but their records
have been consistently above the league average. Wilkens has the strongest record
of the three, winning a title in Seattle and building a contender from the ground
up in Cleveland. Tomjanovich, of course, won back-to-back titles with the Rockets
and would rate higher if we looked at playoff games, but his last four years in
Houston (-12 games) tarnished his record. As for Brown, his +20 last year in Memphis
moved his career mark to the positive side of the ledger.
Nos.
4-7: The darned good ones
Popovich,
Jerry Sloan, Jeff Van Gundy and Don Nelson. While Popovich is the
only one with title bling, all but Nelson have coached in the Finals, and Nellie
made the de facto Finals two years ago against San Antonio. Their records
show it, with each consistently adding two or three wins beyond expectation to
his team's total. Nelly got a +37 for his work in Milwaukee two decades ago, but
his best work has been with his current group in Dallas -- he's +36 in just seven
seasons. Sloan's first three years with the Bulls were a wash, but in Utah he's
+47 over his 16 seasons. Popovich has only coached one team but has put up positive
numbers in six of the past seven seasons.
No.
1A: Johnny come lately
Rick
Carlisle. I mentioned that I didn't include coaches with fewer than five
years of experience, but one has been so good that I have to bring his name up.
Carlisle, in three seasons of coaching, has put together a whopping +36 mark --
making an average of 12 wins better than the norm per season, which is twice as
good as any other active coach. If he just holds serve the next two years -- he'd
have to win around 53 games each season -- he'll be at the top of the charts.
Nos.
1-3: The new legends
Flip
Saunders, Rick Adelman and Brown. Brown, the defending NBA
champion, comes in a close third in this chart. He's improved every team he's
coached except one, and when you consider how many teams that involves, it's a
mighty impressive track record. Brown has won more than the expectation in 19
of his 24 seasons, including seven where he beat it by 10 games or more.
However,
Brown is bested in this department by two coaches who haven't won the big
one yet -- which, ironically, was the rap on Brown before this season. The first
is Adelman, who would rank even higher if not for two unfortunate years in Golden
State. He's surpassed expectations by 10 or more games in five of his 13 NBA seasons
but has been foiled by Phil Jackson in his two best shots at a title.
At
the top of the heap is Saunders, the most consistently underrated coach in the
game. He's exceeded the wins expectation in eight of his nine seasons in Minnesota,
transforming a 21-win team into a perennial title contender. His playoff coaching
record was an embarrassment before last season, but that's partly because of the
strength of the Western Conference. Overall Saunders, Adelman and Brown make up
the holy trinity of the game's top coaches now that Jackson is gone, but if I
had to pick one, I'd put my money on Saunders.
And
how about Big Chief Triangle? Jackson stands at 82 games above expectation in
his 14 NBA seasons, or about 5.8 games better a season. That puts him comfortably
ahead of the likes of Saunders and Adelman and explains why the two don't have
championship rings yet -- they could never get by Phil's teams. With the Zen Master
out of the way, perhaps they can follow Brown's example and claim their elusive
ring.