NBA 20 Greatest Coaches #12

[penbeast0]

The 20 Greatest NBA Coaches Poll
1. Red Auerbach
2. Phil Jackson
3. Pat Riley
4. Greg Popovich
5. Larry Brown
6. Chuck Daly
7. Red Holzman
8. John Kundla
9. Alex Hannum
10. Bill Sharman
11. Jerry Sloan

Lenny WIlkens 32 years (8 with Seattle) / 1x Coach of the Year / 1 championship (Seattle)
Career NBA 2487 1332 1155 .536

Don Nelson 29 years (11 with Milwaukee) / 3x Coach of the Year / no championships
Career NBA 2316 1309 1007 .565

Jack Ramsay 21 Years (10 with Portland) / 1 championship (Portland)
Career NBA 1647 864 783 .525

Rick Adelman 18 years (8 with Sacramento) / no championships
Career NBA 1397 860 537 .616

Doug Moe 15 years (10 with Denver) / 1x Coach of the Year
Career NBA 1157 628 529 .543

Hubie Brown 15 years (5 with ATL/NYK) / 1 championship (Kentucky ABA)
Career TOT 1087 528 559 .486

Slick Leonard 14 years (12 with Indiana)/ 3 championships (Indiana ABA)
Career TOT 1107 573 534 .518

Rudy Tomjanovich 13 years (12 with Houston)/ 2 championships (Houston)
Career NBA 943 527 416 .559

K.C. Jones 11 years (5 with Boston) / 2 championships (Boston)
Career TOT 858 552 306 .643

Billy Cunningham 8 years (all in Philly) / 1 championship
Career NBA 650 454 196 .698

Bill Russell 8 years (5 in Seattle) / 2 championships (as player/coach in Boston)
Career NBA 631 341 290 .540

Anyone else that people feel strongly enough about to vote for as their choice for one of the greatest coaches of all time?

I think I will vote for Don Nelson here. He has been tremendously innovative and pretty successful in a number of different environments with small ball lineups, point forwards, etc. My favorite Nelson trick was when he used to have his players come down and just set up in a zone back when that was illegal; daring refs to call it . . .but his teams were well coached enough that they kept it a matchup zone and he got away with it. People do say that this kind of "gimmick" team can't win it all, but except for his Milwaukee teams (which ran into the Bird/McHale/Parish/DJ teams and the year they beat them, ran into the Moses/Erving/Toney/Cheeks Sixers) he has never had real championship talent but rather has pushed what he has to about the max it could be pushed.

[WesWesley]

Vote Nelson.

[penbeast0]

A few notes on the guys I have up there:

Wilkens and Ramsey never impressed me that much as coaches. Wilkens's teams were generally about as good or bad as their talent, his main qualification is his longevity. Ramsey was the ultimate system coach. He needed a particular type of player and talent that didn't fit his system was never developed. He did win sometimes with lesser talent if it fit his system and had that one magical year with Portland but give him most of the other coaches' teams that are listed here and he doesn't match their accomplishments.

KC Jones, Rudy T, and Slick Leonard had great talent and held it together for championships; they belong in the top 20 somewhere.

Doug Moe, for all the stuff about his crazy run and gun teams in Denver, managed to make all-stars out of players others had discarded or pegged as role players (Alex English, Fat Lever, Michael Adams, Kiki Vandeweghe, Jay Vincent) to say nothing of successful roleplayers out of the likes of Danny Schayes, Hound Dog Kelly, Wayne Cooper, T.R. Dunn, Bill Hanslick, etc. while no one ever went to another team from Denver and achieved more than they did for Moe. That has always impressed me.

As for Adelman, he won consistently with a team built around Chris Webber and Peja Stojakovic who are not guys known for defense or leadership. That impresses me too.

Any names anyone wants me to add to the list?

[pancakes3]

KC Jones.

[WesWesley]

Wilkens, Adelman, Jones, Nelson are all good candidates for this spot I think with Adelman and WIlkens likely being the choices of the for the upcoming spots.

The reason I choose Nelson is because I feel that if he is the smartest coach out of all that remain. He truly is a phenom when it comes to understanding the small intricacies of the game.

Even today, when I watch Golden State play, I can see what Nelson is doing and truly appreciate his attention to specifics and understanding on how to exploit teams from a matchup perspective.

His in game adjustments are precise.

If I had to choose any coach to coach my team for one game out of the remaining coaches it would be him. Definitely the smartest coach left, and he's not a push over as we've seen with the whole Chris Webber fiasco that went on in the mid 90s where Webber wanted to play the 1,2,3,4 and 5 in the same sequence and Nelly wasn't taking his prima donna crap.


Edit: I know he won't go top 20, hasn't had a long enough career and whatnot, but Lawrence Frank is a great coach.

[The Explorer]

So Sloan was 11th right?

penbeast, a couple names to add to the list - Hubie Brown and Billy Cunningham


For 12th, I will vote Slick Leonard

[penbeast0]

I added them, though I don't think either compare to the guys up there.

Hubie Brown did win a ring his first year coaching with Kentucky (incredibly stacked team) and did a nice job in ATL but he's got a losing record overall; I'd rank him below Kevin Loughery who isn't on the list either but coached longer and was the coach for Dr. J and the Nets (2 rings) -- though he was one of the two coaches for the WORST team of all time .

As for Collins, he had Jordan in Chicago and couldn't get over the hump, plus I was extremely unimpressed by his "developing" Kwame Brown from an insecure HS kid to a NBA bust. Michael Jordan and his ego had a lot to do with both problems but a great coach is one who makes those things work; Collins is a smart, knowledgeable man but was not in control enough to get MJ to shut up and not hurt the team.

[The Explorer]

Collins? I said Billy Cunningham.

[penbeast0]

oops

[Silver Bullet]

A few notes on the guys I have up there:

Wilkens and Ramsey never impressed me that much as coaches. Wilkens's teams were generally about as good or bad as their talent, his main qualification is his longevity. Ramsey was the ultimate system coach. He needed a particular type of player and talent that didn't fit his system was never developed. He did win sometimes with lesser talent if it fit his system and had that one magical year with Portland but give him most of the other coaches' teams that are listed here and he doesn't match their accomplishments.

KC Jones, Rudy T, and Slick Leonard had great talent and held it together for championships; they belong in the top 20 somewhere.

Doug Moe, for all the stuff about his crazy run and gun teams in Denver, managed to make all-stars out of players others had discarded or pegged as role players (Alex English, Fat Lever, Michael Adams, Kiki Vandeweghe, Jay Vincent) to say nothing of successful roleplayers out of the likes of Danny Schayes, Hound Dog Kelly, Wayne Cooper, T.R. Dunn, Bill Hanslick, etc. while no one ever went to another team from Denver and achieved more than they did for Moe. That has always impressed me.

As for Adelman, he won consistently with a team built around Chris Webber and Peja Stojakovic who are not guys known for defense or leadership. That impresses me too.

Any names anyone wants me to add to the list?

Wilkens gets a bad rap. He was not as bad as people make him out to be. Look at how his teams fared with other coaches. I personally remember him outcoaching JVG in the Raptors-Knicks series a few years ago, and I remember him matching Larry Brown move for move.

[mojomarc]

Ramsay may have been a system coach, Pen, but he made the playoffs year after year with often quite inferior talent in Portland after the collapse of the Walton team. The things he was able to do with lineups like Kenny Carr, Darnell Valentine, Jim Paxson, Mychal Thompson and Wayne Cooper earned him his HoF space as much as the 76-78 period did.

[penbeast0]

But, SB and Marc, do you really think they are the best coaches left? Is Lenny better than Don Nelson among the guys with 30+ years; did Ramsey do more with less than the likes of Nelson or even Doug Moe? How do they compare to the multiple ring coaches like Slick, KC, or Rudy?

Compare them to Flip Saunders and sure . . . I'll take any of them unless Flip gets the Wiz past the second round of the playoffs but that's not who they are being compared to.

[Roger Murdock]

What about Bill Russell?

[Harison]

KC Jones IMO

[mojomarc]

Pen--yes, I think Ramsay is much better than Moe. You might have more of an argument with Nelson, who I think is criminally underrated, but Ramsay coached directly against Moe and beat him most of the time when Moe had as good or better talent (certainly and frequently more experienced talent). Moe was, during that time, not considered all that great a coach except the year he won CoY and that was during an era when such luminaries as Mike Shuler won CoY for riding better than average talent to better than average records.

There's a reason why when the NBA named their 10 greatest coaches in 96-97, Ramsay was considered one of them and Moe was not.

[penbeast0]

With the exception of Dan Issel who was a legit talent before Moe, Moe got "more" talent by creating that talent. English and Lever were young roleplayers with some potential but certainly not considered superstar potential before coming to the Nuggets. Adams and Schayes were considered flops. Moe was a guy who looked at players in a unique and unbiased way rather than trying to fit them into a slot and so got great production out of guards with no shot (T.R.Dunn), who make Lever into a triple double machine (in Portland, they tried to make him fit the traditional PG mold with mediocre success), who won with a C and PF who were the worst rebounding big combination in the league (Issel was a bit below average, Kiki was terrible), who won starting waiver wire finds like Wayne Cooper.

Ramsey always seemed to me to waste talent if they didn't fit the rigid roles of his system. His system was a great one; he's one of the smartest coaches ever; but it was his way or the highway. Moe made his system work for offensive talent, no offense talent, any kind of talent (except the bad first round draft choices Vince Boryla continuously made; they were generally awful and none of them ever went on to have success elsewhere after failing with Denver). That's why I consider Moe the better coach; though not up to the standards of Nelson or some of the others.

[mojomarc]

Ramsay definitely passed by talent that didn't work in his system, but still think you can't claim that he had more talent to work with on his roster at any given time. He had some absolutely dreadful lineups to work with most of the time, and frequently got far better performances out of players than you would have expected based on their talents just like you claim Moe did. Cooper, Bobby Gross, Tom Owens--these were scrubs that he made into contributors on very good teams as starters.

As for the "Moe made players," Cooper made the leap (what it was) to a 17ppg Per36 player/16 PER after playing under Ramsay the first time, then went to Denver where he had basically two equal seasons before declining, but you credit this to Moe. Alex English became a star under Moe, but he was already a 20ppg player Per36 before he ever got to Denver, but surely thrived when Moe let him increase his shots 30% despite the fact that English only eclipsed his second year eFG% once under Moe. So this idea that he got the most out of his players isn't entirely accurate. It is probably fair to say he got as much out of his players as could have been gotten out of them consistently, but that he really didn't necessarily improve their production through his coaching. He just did, like most coaches try to do, a competent job of using what he had. Heck, even Lever didn't make a serious leap above his Portland production until his third year under Moe--is that just getting a young player and having him mature naturally as he moves into his mid-20s, or is that really a strong Moe influence?

Needless to say, as someone who was religiously watching the league at that point, I think it was a case that Moe had a lot of natural talent and didn't get in their way much, but that he didn't contribute a ton to it either. Maybe that's the quality of a very good coach, but I don't think it makes one a better coach than someone who could mold disparate talents like Ramsay did into a system that consistently got more wins out of the team than rightly should have been achieved.

Not to mention that the players that drove his biggest successes were players he got from Portland in the Vandeweghe trade, players that had already been coached on the fundamentals by Ramsay

[penbeast0]

Cooper was a reserve getting less than 10 pts/6 reb with Portland in 84 (admittedly in 20 min/game). Moe used him as a starting center on a winning team which was considered a major reach at the time. Lever in the role Ramsey forced him into was averaging only 14/4/6.5 per 36 . . . a long way from the star he developed into under Moe. And it's hard to say a team with Lever, Clyde Drexler, Jim Pason (John's 6-6 All-Star brother), Calvin Natt (healthy), Kenny Carr, and Mychal Thompson is a low talent team ;

You also underestimate Bobby Gross, who was basically prime Tayshaun Prince, and Tom Owens, who had been a valuable rotation center with the ABA Carolina Cougars too . . . The key for me though is that the bit about Lever, Adams, Dunn, etc. isn't that they matured but that they developed in an unexpected way. Moe's ability to develop and maximize unique talent (Ramsey's weakness), not his bench coaching (which was mediocre; and a major strength of Ramsey's) or his inspirational ability, or even his ability to manage egos, was what makes me consider him one of the NBA's great coaches.