Bryan Colangelo, in his 15 years as an NBA general manager, has employed eight coaches. And the way David Berri sees it, all that firing and hiring has mostly been in vain.
“Most NBA coaches have no impact on the performance of their players,” said Berri.
David Berri isn't an NBA GM. He’s a PhD in economics who recently co-authored a book that takes a dim view of the NBA’s coaching carousel. Stumbling on Wins, a wide-ranging work that attempts to stamp some empirical truth on the sporting world’s murky mumbo-jumbo, contains key results of a 2009 academic study that attempted to determine the impact of NBA coaches. And while the study concluded that some coaches make a difference — Phil Jackson, the 10-ringed Zen master currently helm of the L.A. Lakers, is heralded by the numbers as a transformative genius — the overwhelming gist is that an NBA team is only as good as its players.
“If the Raptors got a new coach, what would he say to (Andrea) Bargnani? ‘We'd like you to get 15 rebounds a game?’ ” Berri said in a recent interview. “Bargnani would probably say, ‘Well, I'd like to get 15 rebounds a game, too. But that's not going to happen unless you make the game 300 minutes long.’ That's the thing about (NBA players): You can't dramatically alter their performance.”
NBA teams, of course, often attempt to sell an opposing view. A new coach equals new hope, no matter that the players haven't much changed. But a read through Stumbling on Wins, which includes the key conclusions of a study of 62 NBA coaches from 1977-78 to 2007-08, suggests fans should be weary of such pitches.
While Raptors coach Jay Triano wasn’t included in the study, some of his predecessors were analyzed. The likes of Sam Mitchell and Lenny Wilkens, said Berri, “had no impact at all” on the performance of their players. The study suggests, on the other hand, that a team hiring Jackson could expect 17 additional victories in his first year on the scene.
Other coaches who ranked highly in the study: San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich (good for nearly 16 additional wins in his first year with your team), Golden State’s Don Nelson (plus-11 victories in his first year), Flip Saunders and Jim O’Brien. Only one of the eight coaches who have worked under Colangelo made the grade. The study suggests that the theoretical arrival of the late Cotton Fitzsimmons, who worked under Colangelo in Phoenix, could improve a team by about 16 wins in year one.
“Players tend to get better when they come to Phil Jackson,” write Berri and Schmidt. And players, Berri added in an interview, don't get worse after they leave Jackson, which suggests their improvement can't merely explained by their presence on the same floor as, say, Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, or their role in Jackson's triangle offence. The study found, for instance, that players saw drop-offs in production after leaving the unorthodox system run by Nelson.
What do NBA GMs think of the work of Berri and his colleagues? Berri said he has spoken to a few NBA executives, and he has done a “little bit” of paid number crunching for NBA teams. But he said working for a franchise isn't his goal, nor is gaining the approval of front-office executives.
“I think people in the NBA read what I write. They just won't publicly react to it,” Berri said.
Colangelo, for his part, said he has read only parts of the first book-length project in which Berri was involved, 2006’s The Wages of Wins. The GM has yet to crack Stumbling on Wins. But told of the crux of the NBA coaching study therein, Colangelo took umbrage.
“There's too many human elements in our game to rely solely on numbers to determine, ‘Oh, one guy's a good coach and one guy's not a good coach,’ ” said Colangelo. “There are all kinds of ways you can cut up data and statistics.”
If one detects skepticism emanating from Colangelo's corner office to Berri’s ivory tower, maybe it's mutual. Berri spent part of an afternoon this week mocking what he perceived to be the absurdity of many an NBA reality, including the coach-run sideline huddle.
“I saw where Adrian Dantley (coaching the Denver Nuggets) kept saying, ‘We're giving up too many layups.’ And it's like the players were sitting there saying, ‘Yes, we know. We don't want them to get layups, either. Why don’t you tell us how to stop them?’ ” said Berri. “They keep putting the mic on (Boston coach Doc Rivers) and he keeps saying the same thing, ‘We've got to play like a team.’ I mean, I’m getting tired of that. I can't imagine what the players are thinking. . . . You've got to imagine (Celtics forward) Kevin Garnett, when Doc Rivers is talking, is, like, “Are you done yet? Can I go play? Yep. Play like a team. Got it.” That's coaching.”
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