moofs wrote:Why should he get a head coaching job given how excellent he is as a defense coach? "Tom, you did absolutely great at this one job - showed yourself to be tops in the league! So uh, we'd like to hire you to do something else." You could almost call it typecasting, but it might also be that they don't want to add things to what they already know him to be excellent at, potentially disrupting his best demonstrated skill in the process.
Doubt you've run into it yet, but something similar to that sort of thing can also limit your career salary if you are hired for X number of years at salary Y, it starts to get difficult to move up your pay grade because people start to assume there must have been reasons you didn't move up (at least this is what I always hear from people and headhunters, haven't actually run into it myself).
Assistant coaches aspire to be head coaches just like assistant managers hope to be general managers. How much adjustment is needed when an assistant coach is promoted to become a head coach? Probably not as much adjustment as what Del Negro, a former assistant general manager, has/had to go through. Don't you think it's more logical to hire someone with a similar experience rather than someone whose background appears to be more distant (i.e. an assistant coach over any other position)?
Many reputable assistant coaches made a nice transition in their careers: earning jobs as head coaches. A few even won championships and earned their reputation as some of the best head coaches the league has ever had. For example, Greg Popovich, Jerry Sloan, Pat Riley, and Jeff Van Gundy were all former assistant coaches. With 18 years of coaching experience, Tom Thibodeau should be well qualified as a head coach in many teams. His length of experience and effectiveness as a coach show that he's undoubtedly more qualified than some of the coaches that were hired recently: Del Negro, Michael Curry and Terry Porter.
I am not sure if your analogy, bolded above, is similar to this case. First of all, the role of an assistant coach is not too far off from the role of a head coach. Second, I am proposing that Thibodeau should be a head coach for a different team and NOT the Celtics. I don't think other employers care if hiring Thibodeau can potentially deteriorate his own strength. All they want to do is to minimize risk by taking the best coach available and see how it unfolds. What's better is that Thibodeau has zero coaching reputation as opposed to someone like Isiah Thomas or Mike Woodson who have a negative reputation.
I say give the man the better job that he deserves!!!
