How do you evaluate an NBA coach?

[King Poetic]

I like the fact Ime was under Pop for like 7 years

Did a good assistant job in philly and Brooklyn and then Boston and Houston as head coach

But it’s hard evaluate coaches on who will be good or bad

 

[InGodWeTrust]

I’ve learned lately it’s about rotations.

Player match ups mean more now than ever

 

[Long Live The Kane]

I use a flow chart method

For example:

Is he a coach for a team that LeBron plays on?

If Yes…

Is he currently in the midst of championship run with said team?

If no..not a good coach

If yes….its all LeBrons doing, he gets no credit….still not a good coach


And so on

 

[Saysumthinfunnymike]

You can talk about rotations, minutes, get into the X's and O's of it but big picture what are the expectations and is the team meeting those expectations? That's what the front office is looking at. There's going to be other variables like injuries playing a factor and how well the team was able to navigate through them.

 

[UnQuantized]

The ability create a team identity within a short space of time

The ability to get the best out of players beyond the 6 or 7 main guys

The ability to make in game adjustments on the fly in high pressure situations

Knowing how to get the best out of your number one option. Identifying what the main man needs to be surrounded by to neutralize his weaknesses and support his strengths

Hard to get all of these qualities in one coach. I would say Phil Jackson, Greg Popovich, Larry Bird, Steve Kerr, Stan Van Gundy, Rick Carlisle, Tyron Lue are the coaches I think have embodied at least two of these qualities or more at the highest level at one point or another.

The most important job in basketball in my opinion is general manager and the front office. Identifying talent throught drafts, free agency and trades is very challenging especially in this era where it's nearly impossible to stack stars in their prime on one team.

 

[duckbutta]

Rotations ( are they just not flat out bad and nonsensical )
Stubbornness ( does the coach have "a system" and refuses to deviate from it)
Ugly offense (to much one on one ball)
Players don't seem to like him or care if he gets fired ( Mike Malone)

A good example would be Carlisle. Dude was an argumentative dikkhead in Dallas calling a set play every fukking time arguing with gawd tier basketball minds like Jason Kidd and Rondo until Luka finally told him to go fukk himself and he quit before he got fired. Now in Indy he doesn't call very many set plays, he does a really good job of adjusting to the game as it goes, and he has learned to tell the difference between when a player is a bad fit for a series vs just playing bad but will pull out of it. A bad coach would have probably stopped playing Mathurin in the knicks series cause he had been terrible, but a good coach like Carlisle is understood that some of his badness was just luck and would bounce the other way, so he stuck with him and he balled out in game 3.

The problem in general is that people tend to give coaches credit in places they shouldn't and not credit them in places they should so then a narrative about them forms. Narratives are just a problem in sports period but that is a whole other story. They formed this narrative around Kenny this year that he was some genius who had unlocked all this blah blah blah with the cavs and then he went home in the second round just like the coach the cavs fired did last year. Meanwhile the coach they fired took a team who literally lost the most games in a row ever to the playoffs and had them in every game against a team that's playing in the conference finals now.

 

[Gil Scott-Heroin]

I've said for the longest that fans overrate and underrate coaches, simultaneously, where you're not going to get anything meaningful from all the hot takes on them.