Let’s start with some math: five teams have won an NBA championship since 2020, the Los Angeles Lakers are one of them, but they are now on their third coach in this period with the hiring of JJ Redick.
Frank Vogel won a title, then got fired. Darvin Ham made it to the conference finals, then got bounced. Now Redick comes in as a star rookie as we hear ridiculous comparisons to Pat Riley, Steve Kerr and Eric Spoelstra. It’s almost too absurd to laugh.
Yeah, we understand. Redick is a smart guy. It looks and sounds sharp. The Riley lineup, if you really want to be that lazy, lands in your lap from a headshot perspective, as does Kerr due to their similar player profiles and broadcast backgrounds.
That’s not to say Redick won’t be a successful coach. Or even an all-time great. But if he is, like those names above, he will be the exception. Not the rule. The rule is that almost all NBA coaches are tied almost directly to their roster. They might get a little more or less out of the group they were given, but not much. The Lakers, who have hired and fired seven coaches since Phil Jackson’s departure in 2012, aren’t the only ones who still think they’ve nailed the exception.
To list coaches who were expected to make a significant difference purely in terms of fees, barring a roster upgrade, pretty much like their predecessor, would take forever, but let’s look at some recent examples.
The Hawks hired Quin Snyder to replace Nate McMillan – who, it should be noted, himself benefited largely from the circumstances while Atlanta was healthy in 2021, just as he replaced Lloyd Pierce – when he Turns out McMillan, along with a few more years of evidence, hasn’t actually been able to lift a Hawks roster that can’t defend and is too reliant on stagnant individual creation.
Snyder came in with a plan to play faster and shoot more 3s, and the Hawks got worse. Doc Rivers was brought in to replace Adrian Griffin in Milwaukee, and the Bucks, record-wise, got worse. Rivers was also tabbed as the guy who would improve on what the Sixers were capable of doing under Brett Brown, who never made it past the second round. Two coaches later, the Sixers still haven’t reached the conference finals.
Chauncey Billups reportedly speaks the same point guard language as Damian Lillard, who now plays for Rivers. Steve Nash was the same weight as the former player. Monty Williams was the man who led Detroit into the future, and he lasted one year. Jason Kidd, supposedly, just got the same extension as McMillan in Atlanta – a coach who was on the sidelines when the stars aligned. Kidd is not a better coach than Rick Carlisle. He just had Kyrie Irving as a model citizen and massive additions at the trade deadline.
Again, if the team improves and the coach, in turn, magically improves, do the math. This time last year, Joe Mazzulla was supposedly a bad coach. Did he suddenly become a champion because he understood when to call timeouts or because he got Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis?
Was Nick a nurse? that much better than Dwane Casey, who literally won Coach of the Year the summer he was fired, or did he just walk into Kawhi Leonard?
Is Chris Finch, the guy who put Rudy Gobert on the court in an obvious switching situation against Luka Doncic to lose a conference finals game, some sort of savior or was he just by chance in the seat when Gobert came in to guarantee a top defense and Anthony Edwards became a superstar?
Did the Knicks become a #2 seed because they are “a Thibs team!” » or because they got Jalen Brunson? Before answering, everyone realizes that Tom Thibodeau is a good coach. That’s not the point. The fact is he went 78-76 in two seasons before having Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart and Isaiah Hartenstein and Donte DiVincenzo and finally OG Anunoby. There was a time when Thibodeau was in the hot seat because he supposedly didn’t know how to coach the modern offense. Funny how Brunson changed that.
This is not to take anything away from Mazzulla, Nurse, Finch, Thibodeau or any other NBA coach who isn’t Kerr, Spoesltra or Gregg Popovic. It goes without saying that they are all incredibly intelligent, accomplished and skilled basketball players. It is simply an indisputable fact that most of them, certainly over time, will not produce a net result that deviates significantly from the realistic level of the list they are working with.
The bottom line, by the way, is the key term here. Coaches impact players and teams in all kinds of ways. It’s about relationships and communication behind closed doors. In fact, Redick said Taylor Rooks in 2022, he sees coaching “as a way to help”.
“So many people have helped me in my career,” Redick said. “And not just the head coaches, the assistant coaches, the player development people, and they hold such a precious place in my heart and in my life. And I would love to be one of those people one day.”
What Redick is talking about, the relationships that are cultivated through coaching, the impact that one person can have on another, which is a very rewarding and fulfilling thing, it’s great and all, but it’s not what gets head coaches hired or fired. This is not a high school where the job description includes shaping young men. Redick does not receive a $1,500 coaching stipend while teaching third period science.
No, he would have made more than $30 million over four years to do one thing: get results. Victories and defeats. That’s it. So let’s leave it at this: the Lakers won 47 games last year and lost in the first round. You can point to Kerr, who almost miraculously took the Warriors from 51 wins and a first-round loss in their final season under Mark Jackson to 67 wins and a championship in his first season at the helm (with much of the same workforce), but again, this is a unique exception.
This Warriors team was woefully undercoached by Jackson. Arguably there has never been a basketball situation more ripe for a new coach to come in and become an immediate hero with a complete overhaul of the offense just waiting to be done.
Tell me, on a macro level, what is Redick going to do differently than Ham? And we’re not talking about Prince Taurus minutes. We’re talking about things that will really change the fortunes of the team. Redick says LeBron will play more with the ball and Anthony Davis will be used in a particular way?
Wow. Stop traffic. We have some revolutionary ideas here! The Lakers have been trying to play LeBron for years. That’s why they brought in Russell Westbrook for crying out loud. You know what the key is to playing LeBron more without the ball? Finding someone better than D’Angelo Russell to play on the ball. I’m not hiring JJ Redick.
Indeed, coaches are not hired and fired with such absurd frequency because there is really a lot of difference from one to the other. Press releases will talk about commanding respect in the locker room and all that jazz, but in truth, coaches are just the easiest variable to change when things aren’t going as well as you hoped.
You can’t just change players. There are contracts. And a salary cap. But coaches can always be traded, and as long as that’s the case, teams like the Lakers will continue to lump their bench “activity” together and try to sell it as real progress on the court.
He’s the front office equivalent of that guy who stands half court and dribbles the air off the ball, wowing less demanding fans with a series of fancy maneuvers designed to distract you from the fact that in everything his circle, he didn’t actually get any closer to the goal.
In all likelihood, the Lakers are no closer to their goal of winning a championship with Redick than they were with Ham. And they certainly weren’t any closer to Ham than they were to Vogel, who actually won it all because he had a two-way team with multiple playmakers, size and defensive versatility ( and because Anthony Davis was able to shoot mid-range jumpers in a high school gymnasium, but that’s beside the point).
So here’s what’s going to happen: either the Lakers are going to change their roster significantly enough to actually change their on-court fortunes, in which case Redick, and the smart people who hired him, will be showered with praise, or they won’t improve the roster, and LeBron and Davis won’t be as durable as last year, and Redick suddenly won’t look as good.
At that point we will all start discussing who will replace him.
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