penbeast0 wrote:Just saw a quick article on MS Startup with their rankings:
Red Auerbach
Phil Jackson
Gregg Popovich
Pat Riley
Don Nelson
Jerry Sloan
Chuck Daly
Red Holzman
KC Jones
Steve Kerr
Is there anyone who doesn't belong? If so, who should be in the top 10? Probably the most interesting question, what are your criteria for ranking them? Do you care only about maximizing rings considering the available talent or do you care more about the ability to manage egos or innovation and invention?
I know I ran a top 20 coaches of all time project a few years ago but I didn't sticky it to the Projects thread so if anyone finds it, let me know and I will.
So, this seemslike a time to break out my COY Shares from '45-46 onwards. Top 10:
1. Phil Jackson
2. Red Auerbach
3. Pat Riley
4. Gregg Popovich
5. John Kundla
6. Alex Hannum
7. Steve Kerr
8. Erik Spoelstra
9. Al Cervi
(tie) Mike D'Antoni
Other guys on their list:
13. Chuck Daly
15. Red Holzman
(tie) KC Jones
22. Don Nelson
35. Jerry Sloan
Which means I added 5 guys: Kundla, Hannum, Spoelstra, Cervi & D'Antoni
Of course a Shares-based approach is overly simple, and can easily be argued to overrate guys from the past like Kundla & Cervi.
Hannum is the guy who it bugs me the most he's not on their list. To me, if he's not on the list, the people making the list don't know what they're doing.
Spoelstra I figure this is more about "not yet" than anything else so I don't think there's any serious disagreement there.
I think clearly D'Antoni is underrated by folks because he never coach a team to an NBA title, but to be honest I think a Shares-based approach like I used here actually underrates him. He's the most influential NBA coach of the 21st century and while he has his weak sports, those weak spots are not actually the reason why he was forced to move around from team to team. Rather, it's D'Antoni's strengths that made everyone else think him problematic, because he was right when everyone else was wrong.
So then if were to ignore Kundla & Cervi, and just replace 3 coaches with my other 3 guys, I'd remove Jones, Nelson & Sloan, a chronological list that looks like:
Red Auerbach (born 1917)
Red Holzman (1920)
Alex Hannum (1923)
Chuck Daly (1930)
Pat Riley (1945)
Phil Jackson (1945)
Greg Popovich (1949)
Mike D'Antoni (1951)
Steve Kerr (1965)
Erik Spoelstra (1970)
An interesting thing to note here is the gap between Daley & Riley. While 15 years may or may not be all that strange, it's funny that within that 15 year span we have the notorious influx of players - Pettit, Russell, Baylor, Wilt, Oscar, West, among others.
A couple of other notes on the guys mentioned who are not in the 10 I'm putting forward:
Kundla was the coach of the Mikan Laker dynasty. My impression of Kundla is that he was largely in the right place at the right time, most obviously given that George Mikan won his first chip on the Chicago Gears while Kundla was coaching at a minor college (St. Thomas in Minnesota). I don't want to knock Kundla too hard here because there were absolutely things that needed to be figured out on the Lakers, and dealing with the egos of Mikan and Jim Pollard. I believe there was a tremendous amount of innovation happening on the Lakers in those years and that a problematic coach could have gotten in the way of that, but I also think that probably any decent college coach with the social skills to deal with player ego would have been successful because Mikan was so driven to excel.
Cervi was the coach of the Syracuse Nationals through that early run of success that included a chip. While the Nationals had a bonafide superstar in Dolph Schayes, the team won with defense, and all agreed that the tone for that defense was set by Cervi, who was player-coach before he was just coach, and who was hailed as the best defender in the world when he was a player (note: he was perimeter player who focused on shutdown man defense). This then to say I think Cervi deserves a ton of credit for making the Nationals what they were philosophically and I don't want to belittle that - we're talking about the first great defensive basketball coach in NBA history here. But as with Kundla, after that one big run, he exits the professional stage. With Kundla, I believe it was a desire to stay in Minnesota (he would become the coach for U of Minnesota). With Cervi? If memory serves his anger got the best of him and he quit as the Nationals coach midseason. He would apparently end up leaving basketball to make more money in management in the trucking business.
Jones is someone I once dismissed as a mere "player's coach" coming in after the hard ass (Fitch), but I do want to shout out that when Bill Russell talks about his partnership with Jones, he's utterly reverential about how Jones saw the game. The two of them hit it off immediately basically being scientists of the game together. Russell had already been doing this before arriving at college, but if memory serves, Russell said that previously he'd been mostly focusing on just rebutting whatever offensive players put forward to him in their attempt to score, while Jones saw a more complex web of interactions and looked to manipulate the opponent's choices. (Worth noting that 'immediately' here meant Russell was a freshman, and not playing for the varsity, but Jones was playing his second year for the team at that point. And on a team that was predominantly White, Russell probably gravitated toward the elder Jones as his mentor.)
It's interesting that Nelson is in and D'Antoni isn't. It makes sense given that Nelson was long established before D'Antoni finally broke through, but to me D'Antoni actually is the thing people cast Nelson as: The Visionary. Both coaches are candidates for the most innovative coach in NBA history, but while Nelson often seemed to operate with caprice, D'Antoni was a guy who tackled problems with a distinct lens that happened to be largely the lens of the game as we know it today. And while I believe D'Antoni tended to have problems coaching because his vision was just too ahead of the curve to keep the necessary buy-in in all cases, with Nelson it just seems like there are times when he starts off on the right track than then veers onto the wrong one.
In the end, the fact that Steve Nash only ever truly became Steve Nash under D'Antoni, after Nelson had futzed around around diminishing Nash's role - and dropping the team out of top contention - immediately prior, is something that's always going to linger for me.
Sloan is someone who I have real questions about. I do think he did a great job on the whole for the Jazz, but I also see him as a micromanager coaching with outlier talents that need autonomy in order to function at their very best.