J the Drafter wrote:Cycklops wrote:Rupert Murdoch wrote:If the Cavs somehow win the title this year, where would his coaching job rank among all-time great coaching jobs? GOAT? Top 5? Top 10?
People won't be able to understand what he did and will just chalk it up to Lebron's awesomeness. They do the same thing to Phil Jackson despite his utterly insane resume.
The love Phil Jackson gets from people annoys me. Let me make a chess comparison for a bit. When people call Mikhail Tal a brilliant tactician, they're basing that statement off all the brilliant sacrifices Tal made--sacrifices that, if occasionally unsound when analyzed deeply, produced results. When people call Anatoly Karpov a masterful positional player, they're basing it off all the games Karpov played--they way Anatoly created a good outpost for a knight, or used his pawns to grab and hold a spatial advantage. When people talk about Jose Capablanca being a chess genius, they base that on analyses of Capablanca's games--his brutally effective strategic prowess, his cunning tactical shots his, his endgame mastery. When people call Phil Jackson the greatest coach of all time, they base if off the success his teams have had--teams which more often than not had HoF duos.
The chess players I mentioned above are appreciated by chess players themselves. These are people who either understand the point of the moves made by Tal/Karpov/Capablanca, or who seek out books and articles by experts who explain what's going on.
The people praising Phil Jackson don't know anything about organizing an NBA offense or defense beyond key buzzwords ( by and large). They don't know much, if anything, about managing people. It's all about the rings to them. Now, great that Phil has them, but there are reasons for it besides Capablanca-esque insight, and the people praising him really aren't qualified to analyze what goes into coaching.
No one is qualified to analyze anyone above them in skill or knowledge. We always have to extrapolate and approximate. In chess, engines like Houdini and Stockfish make this very easy, in basketball we have no such luck. But we can find compelling info anyway. The best data point we have in regards to Phil Jackson is the performance of the superstars who were supposedly carrying him when he wasn't coaching the team. The sample size is quite large and I've done the math before (back-of-napkin style so forgive if some number is off by 1 or something). Let us begin...
Without counting their irrelevant years (Kobe pre-starting, MJ with Wizards, Shaq after Miami)...this gives us about 29 full seasons for all three combined without Phil)
205 wins and 205 losses for Michael Jordan, 0 rings, 0 finals appearances.
344-188 for Shaq, 1 ring, 2 finals appearances.
179-184 for Kobe, 0 rings, 0 finals appearances.
Total of 728-577, 1 ring, 2 finals appearances
(55% percentage, average of 45.7 wins)
With Phil...
1606-454
11 championships, 13 finals appearances
(78% won)
average of 63.9 wins per season
That's very compelling. 45.7 wins and a single Finals appearance and not even one ring (0.5) per 14 seasons is basically the average career for guys like Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd, Reggie Miller, Paul Pierce etc. Good players but not GOAT-level by any stretch. This is precisely what Jordan, Shaq and Kobe did in 29 seasons without Phil Jackson.
Lastly, if you look at the two seasons (94 and most of 95) where Phil had none of the three on the team, he was 55-27 and 34-31, which is a higher winning percentage (equivalent to about 49 wins per season) then they had collectively in their productive years without him (about 46).
So when you approximate, it actually not only indicates that Phil was a major factor in these player's success...but that he's
underrated. He might have been
more of a factor then any one of them individually. Which is insane.
(and a final sidenote, do these same numbers for Pat Riley using Kareem, Magic and Wade, it doesn't work out so well. 4 rings and 5 Finals appearances without him. And don't even think about counting Shaq when you do, it goes up to 7.)
