Ranking Head Coaches
Ranking Head Coaches
A simple system used to rank the careers of NBA head coaches.
In The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, James devised a rather simple six-point system to assign a score to each season of a manager’s career. The system is not particularly sophisticated, but it produces what I think are reasonable results. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so — as I often do — I decided to take one of James’ ideas and apply it to the NBA.
Within each season, I chose to award one point to the head coach for achieving each of the following:
Winning 41 games (or equivalent in seasons with fewer than 82 games).
Winning 50 games (or equivalent).
Winning 60 games (or equivalent).
Making the playoffs.
Reaching the NBA Finals.
Winning the NBA Finals.
That’s a total of six points for each season. You might be wondering “Aren’t the first three cutoffs rather arbitrary?” My answer is “Yes, but I think they’re reasonable.”
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Based on this system, a “perfect” season would be winning the NBA Finals after posting 60 wins (or the equivalent) during the regular season. Seventeen different coaches have achieved this feat a total of 33 times. Seven coaches have recorded multiple such seasons:
7 — Phil Jackson
4 — Red Auerbach
3 — Pat Riley
3 — Gregg Popovich
2 — John Kundla
2 — K.C. Jones
2 — Steve Kerr
As you can see, Phil Jackson is the runaway leader, with as many perfect seasons as Red Auerbach and Pat Riley (or Gregg Popovich) combined.
Anyway, that’s the system. Let’s move on and take a look at some results. We’ll start with the leaders by total score:
88 — Phil Jackson (20 seasons)
83 — Gregg Popovich (27)
81 — Pat Riley (24)
76 — Red Auerbach (20)
61 — Jerry Sloan (26)
58 — George Karl (27)
57 — Doc Rivers (24)
53 — Lenny Wilkens (32)
53 — Don Nelson (31)
48 — Larry Brown (26)
48 — Rick Adelman (23)
This is a good start, but it does tend to over-reward coaches who have coached for a long time. For example, Steve Kerr is a current coach with rather impressive credentials, but he’s served as the head man for just nine seasons and has thus far only accumulated 34 points.
One way to adjust for career length is to look at average score per season rather than total score:
4.40 — Phil Jackson (20 seasons)
4.00 — Ime Udoka (1)
3.80 — Red Auerbach (20)
3.78 — Steve Kerr (9)
3.63 — Billy Cunningham (8)
3.50 — K.C. Jones (10)
3.38 — Pat Riley (24)
3.33 — Larry Bird (3)
3.18 — John Kundla (11)
3.14 — Les Harrison (7)
Kerr moves way up after this tweak, but this list has a problem as well, as coaches with as few as one season end up making the cut. We might be able to solve that by requiring a minimum of 10 seasons as a head coach:
4.40 — Phil Jackson (20 seasons)
3.80 — Red Auerbach (20)
3.50 — K.C. Jones (10)
3.38 — Pat Riley (24)
3.18 — John Kundla (11)
3.07 — Gregg Popovich (27)
2.80 — Mike Budenholzer (10)
2.64 — Chuck Daly (14)
2.60 — Erik Spoelstra (15)
2.38 — Doc Rivers (24)
That’s better, but we lose Kerr. Also, in my opinion Riley’s average score of 3.38 in 24 seasons is much more impressive than K.C. Jones’ average score of 3.50 in 10 seasons. We need a way to account for that.
My solution? Multiply the coach’s career total by his career average (e.g., Phil Jackson’s score is 88 times 4.40, or 387.2). Here are the coaches with a career score of at least 100 using this method:
387.2 — Phil Jackson
288.8 — Red Auerbach
273.4 — Pat Riley
255.1 — Gregg Popovich
143.1 — Jerry Sloan
135.4 — Doc Rivers
128.4 — Steve Kerr
124.6 — George Karl
122.5 — K.C. Jones
111.4 — John Kundla
105.1 — Billy Cunningham
101.4 — Erik Spoelstra
100.2 — Rick Adelman
This system is obviously far from perfect, but I think that looks about right. If numerous NBA experts were asked to create a Mount Rushmore of head coaches, I think Jackson, Riley, Auerbach, and Popovich would emerge as the clear winners. And as you can see in the list above, those four stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of the pack.
A few other notes:
Three coaches on this list — Jerry Sloan, George Karl, and Rick Adelman — do not have an NBA championship on their resume. Sloan and Adelman each coached two teams that made the NBA Finals, while Karl coached one conference champion.
Doc Rivers receives a lot of criticism, but in 24 seasons as a head coach just five of his teams have missed the playoffs, and only three have finished with a losing record. Rivers is one of 41 coaches to participate in at least 75 playoff games. His career winning percentage of .516 puts him in the dead center of that group (21st).
I’m not sure how John Kundla was left off the NBA’s list of the 15 greatest coaches in league history. Kundla’s teams won five NBA titles, a number that’s only been surpassed by Phil Jackson (11) and Red Auerbach (9).
Billy Cunningham is rarely mentioned when the subject of great NBA head coaches is brought up, but his eight-season run with the Philadelphia 76ers was very impressive. Cunningham’s squads won 52 or more games in seven of his eight seasons, with a low of 47 wins in 1978-79. And in the postseason, the Sixers advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals six times, made three appearances in the NBA Finals, and won a championship in 1983.
Let me close by stating something that should be obvious, but probably needs to be said: There are many, many things which should be taken into consideration when evaluating a head coach, most of which are not included here. For example:
Did the coach’s teams frequently exceed or fall short of expectations?
How much did players improve under this coach?
Was this coach a good in-game decision maker?
However, even if not directly addressed, many of these things will be reflected in the coach’s cumulative record. Most of all, though, this is meant to be fun. This system should merely be a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper.